[Bug 571707] Re: fsck progress stalls at boot, plymouthd/mountall eats CPU

Tue Oct 25 19:09:45 UTC 2011

On Tue, Oct 25, 2011 at 05:42:18PM -0000, Chow Loong Jin wrote:
> The status of the bug is correct -- it's fixed in mountall on Ubuntu, and
> mountall in Lucid (via lucid-updates). If it's still broken in Linux Mint, then
> open a task there and set it to the appropriate status. There is no reason to
> demand that the "Fix released" status in Ubuntu be changed to "Won't Fix" when
> it clearly has been fixed over here.

> So to sum it all up in a nutshell, it's all fixed on Ubuntu, but not fixed on
> Linux Mint, so obviously something went wrong somewhere in porting the fix from
> Ubuntu to Mint, so please stop blaming Canonical or Ubuntu for not paying
> attention to this bug report. If you need someone to badger about this bug
> occurring in Mint, find a Mint developer.

There is a task for Linux Mint on this bug already, and its status has been
set to 'fix released' by a Mint developer, apparently on the basis that the
lucid-updates version of mountall was copied into Linux Mint 9.  I believe
it's the status of *this* task that the Mint users are concerned with.
Unfortunately, the Launchpad bug workflow doesn't make this at all clear.
(I think for this reason it might be better for derivatives to use separate
bugs for tracking issues, instead of tasks on Ubuntu bugs.)

There are also comments that the bug is still reproducible with 10.04 with
much lower frequency.  This may be true; when this bug was being worked on,
the analysis was that there was still a bug in plymouth here, just one with
much less user impact now that the mountall side has been fixed.  However
(as you know, but it appears the users subscribed to this bug do not), "LTS"
does not mean that all bugs reported against that release will be fixed; it
means that security support, upgrade support, and commercial support are
provided, and that bugfixes will be made on a best-effort basis.

And there are a number of other plymouth bugs present that are higher-impact
than this one, so it is unlikely that this bug will receive further
attention for 10.04.

-- 
Steve Langasek                   Give me a lever long enough and a Free OS
Debian Developer                   to set it on, and I can move the world.
Ubuntu Developer                                    http://www.debian.org/
slangasek at ubuntu.com                                     vorlon at debian.org

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/571707

Title:
  fsck progress stalls at boot, plymouthd/mountall eats CPU

Status in The Linux Mint Distribution:
  Fix Released
Status in “mountall” package in Ubuntu:
  Fix Released
Status in “plymouth” package in Ubuntu:
  Triaged
Status in “mountall” source package in Lucid:
  Fix Released
Status in “plymouth” source package in Lucid:
  Triaged

Bug description:
  PROBLEM

  When a disk check is performed, the progress stalls somewhere around
  70% and will then take a very long time finishing the remaining
  percent (10 minutes or more).

  PATCH

  Patch for mountall has now been pushed as an update for Lucid, if you
  are still seeing this problem, make sure you have mountall 2.15
  installed before commenting/reporting a new bug.

  [Earlier patch comments:]
  Tero Mononen has published a patch for Bug #553745 which applies to the issue described here as well (see https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/plymouth/+bug/553745/comments/76 and https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/plymouth/+bug/553745/comments/77 )

  I have created corresponding packages which are available through my
  PPA: https://launchpad.net/~arand/+archive/unstable

  !!!Do note that this is an unofficial, untested, preliminary patch!!!
  However testing and feedback is welcome, please especially report if there are ANY (new) problems seen when using the patched version.

  TEST CASE:

  (sudo aptitude install bootchart)
  sudo touch /forcefsck && sudo reboot

  POSSIBLE TEMPORARY WORKAROUNDS

  1. Removing "quiet" and "splash" from the kernel boot line

  2. When the progress has stalled, switch away from the splash screen
  using the left arrowkey (presumably any arrowkey works).

  * Both these approaches speeds up the boot process to ~1 minute
  instead.

  OBSERVATIONS

  The fsck message "(...) non-contiguous (...)" Which I assume indicates
  the end of the fsck, is printed in the Virtual Terminal ("outside"
  plymouth) at around 70% + ~10-20 seconds.

  Disk activity is null from this point on (presumed end of fsck above).

  Bootchart crashes if trying to catch the whole boot at once with
  plymouth (at least for my 1h boot).

  This problem seems to occur in both plymouthd and mountall, semi-simultaneously:
  If you are in the plymouth screen, plymouthd is the cpu-gobbler, if you switch away from it using the arrow keys, mountall instead takes over the cpu-eating.

  #####

  ORIGINAL REPORT

  Binary package hint: mountall

  On my system when fsck runs at boot plymouth % completion count goes
  up quickly (<10 seconds) up to about 80% and then slows down
  considerably: the complete fsck of my 125GB HD, 30% full takes more
  than 5 minutes.

  While this goes on the text VTs are all completely blank: just a
  blinking cursor.

  An fsck from a recovery disk completes in ~10 seconds so it doesn't
  look like "fsck just being slow".

  This slowdown was *not* happening on 2010-04-14 with the PPA described
  by this comment:
  https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/plymouth/+bug/554737/comments/25

  The fix in the PPA is now in the mainline lucid but somewhere in
  between then and today (2010-04-29) something introduced this
  slowdown.

  ProblemType: Bug
  DistroRelease: Ubuntu 10.04
  Package: mountall 2.14
  ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 2.6.32-21.32-generic 2.6.32.11+drm33.2
  Uname: Linux 2.6.32-21-generic i686
  NonfreeKernelModules: wl
  Architecture: i386
  Date: Thu Apr 29 15:38:56 2010
  InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 10.04 "Lucid Lynx" - Beta i386 (20100317.1)
  ProcEnviron:
   LANGUAGE=en_IE:en_GB:en
   PATH=(custom, user)
   LANG=en_IE.utf8
   SHELL=/bin/bash
  SourcePackage: mountall

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