Bug 694647

Please follow [1[ and attache the mentioned files to this report

Thank you

1.http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/How_to_debug_Systemd_problems#All_bug_reports

Created attachment 490694 [details]
dmesg

Created attachment 490695 [details]
messages

Created attachment 490696 [details]
systemd dump

update: it does not happen always. i had to reboot once today to see it happen. when it happened, it took 2 minutes and 50 seconds to get over it.

$ cat /proc/cmdline
ro root=UUID=edece934-ea71-4c50-8890-d4539d57af90 rd_NO_LUKS rd_NO_LVM rd_NO_MD rd_NO_DM LANG=en_US.UTF-8 SYSFONT=latarcyrheb-sun16 KEYTABLE=us

Created attachment 490697 [details]
systemd test

From the log:
  [  187.312786] systemd[1]: Job dev-sda3.device/start timed out.

I suppose you have in your /etc/fstab something like:
  /dev/sda3  swap  swap  defaults 0 0

You should not use /dev/sd* names to refer to disks. The order in which the sda, sdb, sdc names are assigned is not deterministic. It depends on the more or less random order in which the kernel discovers them.

Use either "UUID=...", "LABEL=...", or deterministic "/dev/disk/by-..." names.


Your messages file has a proof that the random naming really happens.
Notice the disk with 7 partitions is sometimes sda and in other boots it is sdc:

$ grep 'sd[abc]:' messages.txt 
Apr  7 04:43:13 localhost kernel: [    2.348214]  sda: sda1
Apr  7 04:43:13 localhost kernel: [    2.820968]  sdb: sdb1
Apr  7 04:43:13 localhost kernel: [    2.873457]  sdc: sdc1 sdc2 sdc3 sdc4 < sdc5 sdc6 sdc7 >
Apr  7 18:38:10 localhost kernel: [    2.323890]  sda: sda1
Apr  7 18:38:10 localhost kernel: [    2.794952]  sdb: sdb1
Apr  7 18:38:10 localhost kernel: [    2.841086]  sdc: sdc1 sdc2 sdc3 sdc4 < sdc5 sdc6 sdc7 >
Apr  7 21:56:09 localhost kernel: [    2.238176]  sda: sda1 sda2 sda3 sda4 < sda5 sda6 sda7 >
Apr  7 21:56:09 localhost kernel: [    2.320917]  sdb: sdb1
Apr  7 21:56:09 localhost kernel: [    2.800394]  sdc: sdc1
Apr  7 22:01:10 localhost kernel: [    2.359911]  sda: sda1
Apr  7 22:01:10 localhost kernel: [    2.829966]  sdb: sdb1
Apr  7 22:01:10 localhost kernel: [    2.901630]  sdc: sdc1 sdc2 sdc3 sdc4 < sdc5 sdc6 sdc7 >

thank you for your help. indeed i had a "faulty" line in fstab and i changed it accordingly. however, i must ask this: does systemd really have to wait 3 minutes to figure out a swap partition is missing? and all this time the boot has to be halted?

In general the boot has to wait until the configured swaps are ready, because continuing without them may result in running out of memory.

Also in general it is correct to give the hardware/kernel/udev enough time to discover the disks.

I see how this situation could be considered special though. When the system has discovered the /dev/sda disk and after reading its partition table it sees only one partition, it should know it is futile to wait for sda3. So perhaps the case could be handled better somehow.

But keeping in mind that this is, after all, a misconfiguration and that there are still reported bugs affecting correctly configured systems, I wouldn't expect much effort going into fixing this inconvenience any time soon.

You can add "nofail" to the mount options of your swap device. If you do then systemd will use it when it shows up, but not wait for it at boot. So I think your case is pretty well covered already.

thank you very much for your support. do you think one day a system will be able to "learn" from experience and add nofail by itself (maybe temporary) if the device was once missing? or if the device is not present in the partition table?

We cannot know what is necessary to make a device show up. We have to assume that a device is just slow in probing, and then eventually time-out.

On certain machines swap devices are needed for normal operation (simply because there is not enough real RAM). I think we should follow user configuration as far as possible, and never rewrite what the user explicitly configured.

i see. is there a way to configure the timeout to a smaller value?

Not right now (unless you configure the swap partition via a .swap unit file, instead of a line in /etc/fstab), but I do plan to add an option for that in fstab very soon.

that would be great. thank you very much.