[Bug 537133] Re: mountall issues with NFS root filesystem

[Elisiano Petrini]

>From what I read this should be fixed already, but I see this problem
even in the latest version (12.04).

I have a 64-bits server (12.04 LTS) and I'm trying to boot a diskless system as a client (64-bit 12.04).
After init-bottom it just hangs there.
I notice the exact same behavior even when I virtualize all the environment (server with 2 interfaces, and client).

Can anyone confirm that this has been seen also in 12.04?

Thanks, Elisiano

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/537133

Title:
  mountall issues with NFS root filesystem

Status in “mountall” package in Ubuntu:
  In Progress
Status in “portmap” package in Ubuntu:
  Fix Released
Status in “mountall” source package in Lucid:
  Confirmed
Status in “portmap” source package in Lucid:
  Fix Released
Status in “mountall” source package in Maverick:
  Confirmed
Status in “portmap” source package in Maverick:
  Fix Released

Bug description:
  Binary package hint: mountall

  I think I've found two bugs in mountall-2.7 related to nfsroots. This
  report describes both, since working around one exposes the other.

  The first bug is a dependency issue, circular and otherwise. Unless
  the nfsroot is mounted with "nolock", NFS locking depends on
  rpc.statd, which depends on portmap, which depends on the "local-
  filesystems" event (in /etc/init/portmap.conf).  mountall will never
  provide this event because it treats the rootfs as "local" even if
  it's networked, for the sake of daemons that need to wait for the
  rootfs to be remounted rw.

  The problem is that portmap.conf needs access to /etc (ro), /var/run
  (rw) and /lib/init/rw (rw). A dependency on "local-filesystems"
  essentially means / and /tmp. Changing the dependency to "virtual-
  filesystems" would be more correct, but I'm not entirely certain that
  remounting / should depend on any general *-filesystems events.

  It gets messier in statd.conf, which doesn't call out any filesystem
  dependencies, yet requires portmap to be running. It tries to directly
  "start portmap" which fails because the mentioned filesystems aren't
  writable yet. Portmap and statd will start successfully later, but not
  in time to satisfy the rootfs dependency.

  The second bug is when one tries to work around the above problems by
  specifying "nolock" in /etc/fstab for the nfsroot. In this case we
  land in mountall.c at the bottom of run_mount() where the is_remote()
  test causes spawn() to be called with wait=FALSE.  spawn() then calls
  nih_child_add_watch() which is supposed to eventually call back to
  spawn_child_handler(), but it appears to fail to connect:

   spawn: mount -n -a -t nfs -o remount,nolock 16.1.1.2:/export/romano /
   spawn: mount / [272]
   spawn: calling nih_child_add_watch for /
   init: job_process_handler: Ignored event 1 (0) for process 272

  The third line is debugging I added. If spawn_child_handler() had been
  called, we would have seen an additional line:

   mount / [272] exited normally

  I didn't dig into libnih to figure out why this isn't working. Rather
  I changed the test on which wait=FALSE depends, since it seems like
  mountall should be waiting for the rootfs. This works, see attached
  patch, though it only fixes the non-ideal "nolock" case.

  ProblemType: Bug
  Architecture: amd64
  Date: Thu Mar 11 01:18:06 2010
  DistroRelease: Ubuntu 10.04
  Package: mountall 2.7
  ProcEnviron:
   LC_COLLATE=C
   PATH=(custom, user)
   LANG=en_US.utf8
   SHELL=/bin/bash
  ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 2.6.32-15.22-generic
  SourcePackage: mountall
  Uname: Linux 2.6.32-15-generic x86_64

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