insserv / dependency boot

Petter Reinholdtsen pere at hungry.com
Wed Oct 7 19:30:29 UTC 2009


[Chris Gianniotis]
> -- booting : when the boot process is finished and X and WDM have been
> started I can't type into either any xterm or, from time to time, even
> the WDM display manager id & password slot. If I then exit the X
> session, log in as root and run WDM manually everything goes well
> after that. Obviously there is a timing error. I have generated the
> boot graphs (attached below) and HAL seems to be started later than
> WDM, which doesn't seem correct.

Looking at the rc2.d sequence, I see that this is a bug in the wdm
package.  I've reported a bug against it, see #550060 for a fix for
the problem.  To fix it locally, edit the file /etc/init.d/wdm and add
the Should-Start line to the header, and run 'update-rc.d wdm
defaults' to reorder the boot based on these new dependencies.

> -- shutting down : this one is potentially more serious as my file
> system is at risk. When I start the system, the various file systems
> frequently show 'recovering journal', indicating that they are not
> being cleanly shut down. I can find no listings in the logs for this
> and I'm afraid that I simply can't tell anything from the graph
> (attached).

I'm not quite sure what could be the reason for this.  I forgot to ask
you to include the output from 'ls /etc/rc6.d', to see the shutdown
sequence too.  I have two suspects for this issue.  Either your system
was not converted using the insserv/sysv-rc package scripts as
reported in #549260, or you are bitten by the hwclock issue reported
in #543375.

> I would much appreciate any ideas or suggestions you might be able to
> make. Is there some sort of available diagnostic routine for
> dependency boot ?  I have searched everywhere for three days now and
> cannot find anything but scattered references and bug reports.

The script /usr/share/insserv/check-initd-order can be used to check
that the scripts are in dependency order, but most of the remaining
issues are simply missing or incorrect dependencies in the individual
packages and it is impossible to know about this without knowing the
requirements of the individual scripts.

I did notice some strange things about your rc2.d/ ordering.
stop-bootlogd is supposed to start last, not first.  The dependency on
$all should enforce this.  Some of the scripts starting very early in
rc2.d/ should probably start after sysklogd, but this is not very
serious, as the only effect is a few lost syslog messages during boot.

Unrelated to the boot ordering, I notice you have both cpufrequtils
and cpufreqd installed.  I've been told that on laptops with Intel
hardware, the default setting from cpufrequtils is preferable and
cpufreqd should not be used.  In any case, I suspect you want one or
the other, not both.

The rcS.d/ ordering indicate that your machine is not using the latest
version of initscripts.  is that correct?  With the latest version,
bootlogd should start before pcmciautils and hostname, and just after
mountdevsubfs.sh.  If you are using testing, I recommend upgrading to
the latest version of that package.

Happy hacking,
-- 
Petter



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