possible bug in mdev (r21557)

Daniel Mierswa impulze at impulze.org
Mon May 26 01:58:06 UTC 2008


Ok this is going to take a while i guess. First i created an initramfs 
(with busybox 1.10.2) on an arm machine using a debian kernel 
2.6.18-ixp4xx for the NSLU2 of a friend and it just couldn't come up. 
We've tried several things (it uses USB devices for rootfs) but i could 
find out where it went wrong. The mount failed. So i checked with ls if 
the device nodes are actually created and they were. Now i tried a new 
initramfs for my machine since i updated to 2.6.25.4 recently and 
earlier LVM versions don't play well with that. Again, I've used busybox 
1.10.2 and what my initramfs basically does is using mdev for initial 
population of /dev and /bin/mdev for hotplugging. After that I'm waiting 
for usb devices to become ready (by using a loop with blkid in it) if 
blkid succeeded I'm using that device. I tried several versions of blkid 
and kernels (with dietlibc, glibc, uclibc, statically linked, 
dynamically linked) and they all won't show the device when asked for 
with blkid. I've checked for the presence of the device nodes and they 
were also there. Then I've tried busybox-1.8.3 and see there, it worked. 
:) So i did a git-svn clone -r20000:HEAD and git-bisect the whole thing 
and it all comes down to one revision where it stopped working which is 
21557 - 
http://busybox.net/cgi-bin/viewcvs.cgi/trunk/busybox/util-linux/mdev.c?rev=21557&view=diff&r1=21557&r2=21556&p1=trunk/busybox/util-linux/mdev.c&p2=/trunk/busybox/util-linux/mdev.c).
Is there a chance that this could be fixed? I just don't want to adjust 
my kernel to busybox (as in allowing deprecated sysfs things or what 
not). If there's any more information needed I'm willing to provide 
them. I'll go check if r21556 works on that NSLU2 in near future. Thanks 
for reading :)

-- 
Mierswa, Daniel

If you still don't like it, that's ok: that's why I'm boss. I simply know better than you do.
               --- Linus Torvalds, comp.os.linux.advocacy, 1996/07/22




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