owl-users - Re: crash

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Date: Wed, 16 Jun 2004 16:05:19 +0400
From: Solar Designer <solar@...nwall.com>
To: owl-users@...ts.openwall.com
Subject: Re: crash

On Wed, Jun 16, 2004 at 03:59:19PM +0400, Michael Tokarev wrote:
> Speaking of the patch... The following change, which is
> in ow patches for quite some time, is rather questionable.
[...]
> -		printk ("VFS: Cannot open root device \"%s\" or %s\n",
> +		printk ("VFS: Cannot open root device \"%s\" or %s, "
> +			"retrying in 1s.\n",
>  			root_device_name, kdevname (ROOT_DEV));
> -		printk ("Please append a correct \"root=\" boot option\n");
> -		panic("VFS: Unable to mount root fs on %s",
> -			kdevname(ROOT_DEV));
> +		set_current_state(TASK_UNINTERRUPTIBLE);
> +		schedule_timeout(HZ);
> +		goto retry;

> Why the above change is needed?

It's needed for booting off USB CD-ROMs where the device might not be
detected by the time this code is reached.

Thank you for pointing out the problem with this and also for sharing
your approach to replacing kernels with owl-users.

I agree that this needs to be fixed, but by enhancing this code to
support a panic timeout rather than by reverting this change like you
do now.  It will happen sooner if you submit a patch to do that. ;-)

-- 
/sd