[Bug 864262] [NEW] remounting filesystems hangs uninterruptibly if network filesystems are unavailable

[Steve Langasek]

Public bug reported:

The "mount filesystems" and "check filesystems" options work by calling
mountall.  This is the correct thing to do; however, if there are
filesystems listed in the fstab that are unavailable (for instance,
because they're network filesystems and the network hasn't been brought
up, or the server is down, or they refer to unavailable disks), mountall
will hang *indefinitely* waiting for them to become available -
particularly in the case of filesystems that it knows are network
filesystems.

This is not a problem when it happens during a normal boot, because
mountall will continue to run in the background.  However, when mountall
is run from friendly-recovery, it becomes the foregrounded console
process and there's no way to reasonably interrupt this to return to the
recovery menu - you effectively have to reboot to get back to the other
recovery options (and probably use SysRq in the process if you want to
actually ensure your rootfs gets cleanly unmounted).

We probably need some improvements to the mountall interface to allow a
"one-shot" approach to mounting network filesystems when called from
friendly-recovery.

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 11.10
Package: friendly-recovery 0.2.18
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 3.0.0-11.18-generic 3.0.4
Uname: Linux 3.0.0-11-generic x86_64
ApportVersion: 1.23-0ubuntu2
Architecture: amd64
Date: Sat Oct  1 12:29:46 2011
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 10.04.1 LTS "Lucid Lynx" - Release amd64 (20100816.1)
PackageArchitecture: all
ProcEnviron:
 PATH=(custom, user)
 LANG=en_US.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
SourcePackage: friendly-recovery
UpgradeStatus: Upgraded to oneiric on 2011-09-23 (7 days ago)

** Affects: friendly-recovery (Ubuntu)
     Importance: Low
         Status: New


** Tags: amd64 apport-bug oneiric running-unity

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/864262

Title:
  remounting filesystems hangs uninterruptibly if network filesystems
  are unavailable

Status in “friendly-recovery” package in Ubuntu:
  New

Bug description:
  The "mount filesystems" and "check filesystems" options work by
  calling mountall.  This is the correct thing to do; however, if there
  are filesystems listed in the fstab that are unavailable (for
  instance, because they're network filesystems and the network hasn't
  been brought up, or the server is down, or they refer to unavailable
  disks), mountall will hang *indefinitely* waiting for them to become
  available - particularly in the case of filesystems that it knows are
  network filesystems.

  This is not a problem when it happens during a normal boot, because
  mountall will continue to run in the background.  However, when
  mountall is run from friendly-recovery, it becomes the foregrounded
  console process and there's no way to reasonably interrupt this to
  return to the recovery menu - you effectively have to reboot to get
  back to the other recovery options (and probably use SysRq in the
  process if you want to actually ensure your rootfs gets cleanly
  unmounted).

  We probably need some improvements to the mountall interface to allow
  a "one-shot" approach to mounting network filesystems when called from
  friendly-recovery.

  ProblemType: Bug
  DistroRelease: Ubuntu 11.10
  Package: friendly-recovery 0.2.18
  ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 3.0.0-11.18-generic 3.0.4
  Uname: Linux 3.0.0-11-generic x86_64
  ApportVersion: 1.23-0ubuntu2
  Architecture: amd64
  Date: Sat Oct  1 12:29:46 2011
  InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 10.04.1 LTS "Lucid Lynx" - Release amd64 (20100816.1)
  PackageArchitecture: all
  ProcEnviron:
   PATH=(custom, user)
   LANG=en_US.UTF-8
   SHELL=/bin/bash
  SourcePackage: friendly-recovery
  UpgradeStatus: Upgraded to oneiric on 2011-09-23 (7 days ago)

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