Bug 53096

Summary:	dhcpcd stalls boot when no cable present.
Product:	[Retired] Red Hat Linux	Reporter:	David Woodhouse <dwmw2>
Component:	initscripts	Assignee:	Bill Nottingham <notting>
Status:	CLOSED CURRENTRELEASE	QA Contact:	Brock Organ <borgan>
Severity:	medium	Docs Contact:
Priority:	medium
Version:	7.3	CC:	rvokal
Target Milestone:	---
Target Release:	---
Hardware:	i386
OS:	Linux
Whiteboard:
Fixed In Version:		Doc Type:	Bug Fix
Doc Text:		Story Points:	---
Clone Of:		Environment:
Last Closed:	2004-10-17 03:58:26 UTC	Type:	---
Regression:	---	Mount Type:	---
Documentation:	---	CRM:
Verified Versions:		Category:	---
oVirt Team:	---	RHEL 7.3 requirements from Atomic Host:
Cloudforms Team:	---	Target Upstream Version:
Embargoed:

Description David Woodhouse 2001-09-03 14:58:07 UTC

Since updating to Roswell2, booting the machine with no cable connected to
the Ethernet interface prevents it from booting. dhcpcd seems to have an
insanely long timeout. 

Roswell1 would notice that there was no link and behave correctly.

I'm told that this was changed because some network drivers were broken and
were not reporting a link when in fact there was one. Wouldn't it be
possible  to use ethtool or mii-tool on interfaces which support it to
determine whether there's a link or not?

Comment 1 Bill Nottingham 2001-09-04 00:29:30 UTC

Not really, as it isn't really reliable enough (if you use the version of
mii-tool that uses the wrong ioctl, you can't trust it; if you use the version
of mii-tool that uses the *right* ioctl, it doesn't always work right.)

Comment 2 David Woodhouse 2001-09-04 05:24:28 UTC

The right ioctl just got fixed so the kernel actually bothers to copy the
results back to userspace, which it wasn't doing before. #53050 should be
closed, but I think it's waiting for an 'official' build of the fixed kernel
package.

With that fixed, are there any drivers that support the MII ioctls but return
crap? If so, they should probably just have their support for those ioctls removed. 

Otherwise, is it at least possible to lower the timeout on dhcpcd to a more
useful value? I'm not sure what it is at the moment - but it far exceeds the
level of my patience. After leaving the laptop for a few minutes, I hit SysRq-K,
logged in and removed eth0 from modules.conf, and rebooted it.

Comment 3 Bill Nottingham 2004-10-17 03:58:26 UTC

This is fixed, has been for a while.