Description of problem: Bug 103821 has the whole story. The attachment in the URL above patches mkinitrd such that it handles some of the recent changes in the way the kernel handles firewire hard disks, such as not hanging during boot with a firewire disk connected to the system, or supporting root devices in (raid devices and/or volume groups in) external firewire disks.
Hmmm, this all smells like "huge hack" to me which means the kernel won't get fixed and instead the problem will just get ignored. mkinitrd has enough hacks without more. Why should firewire be different from every other storage adapter in the kernel as far as scanning the bus on module insertion? For now, blocking on kernel bugs. If they don't move anywhere before release, I'll see this again in my passthrough of open mkinitrd bugs.
It is my understanding that the need for userland rescan is one of those can't-fix-in-2.4 (or at least that's what the sbp2 maintainer claims; I don't have a URL handy :-(. The order of loading modules is indeed an ugly hack, but since this hasn't been fixed yet in spite of the age of the bug report, and I don't know that anyone is actually working to fix it, I don't see that we'll have a fix in place in time for the release. And then, this is not the kind of change you shoiuld make to mkinitrd just before a release, so perhaps now is the time to put it in. We can always revert it later (and I promise to monitor kernels until the release and let you know it can be reverted if the kernel bug is fixed).
Out of morbid curiosity, where did you find a bootable firewire controller for x86? What's the make/model/manufacturer? I've been looking for one so I can actually test this scenario, but have been unable to find such a beast.
I can't boot off of it, but I can still use it for the root filesystem, or for physical volumes or raid members that I'd like to have available at boot time.
Patch broken up in smaller, (almost) independent pieces and attached a tarball with them all to bug 103665. Should this bug be closed now?
None of these are needed in FC2test1 any more. All I have to do to get firewire disks to be brought up early in the boot is to mkinitrd --with=sd_mod --with=sbp2. Yay!