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

[Michael Hampson]

[notes #91 and #92]

Upgrading to mountall 2.15 resolved the problem on both machines.
Netbook scan about 10 seconds, desktop about one minute 
(down from 10 minutes and one hour).

Using lucid-proposed can be *far* easier than the complex Wiki page suggests, but it's been made immutable/uneditable! You can do the entire thing from within Synaptic:
1. System / Administration / Synaptic Package Manager
2. Settings / Repositories / Updates / check "Proposed" / Close / click "Reload"
3. Quick-search for item, mark for upgrade, click Apply
4. Settings / Repositories / Updates / uncheck "Proposed" / Close / click "Reload" / close synaptic

Anyone can try this now to test mountall 2.15 ... but after that, who
has the authority to put this simple procedure at the top of the
'immutable' Wiki page instead of the current scary paragraphs of
terminal hacks?

-- 
fsck progress stalls at boot, plymouthd/mountall eats CPU
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/571707
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Status in “mountall” package in Ubuntu: Fix Released
Status in “plymouth” package in Ubuntu: Triaged
Status in “mountall” source package in Lucid: Fix Committed
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 accepted into -proposed. See https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Testing/EnableProposed for documentation how to enable and use -proposed.

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