Bug#594472: grub-pc: scary messages and very long boot time after upgrade

[Toni Mueller]

Hi,

On Mon, 30.08.2010 at 08:55:23 +0100, Dh H <dhh4711 at googlemail.com> wrote:
> So this looks a bit like there are two erros:
>  1) mdadm is broken in 3.1.2 and brings up these errormessages.
>  2) Grub2 seems to be broken, as it does not start crypto,
> consecutively failing to bring up LVM

thanks for the analysis. I'm under the impression that mdadm does
assemble the raids, but then fails to recognize the partition table.
But I don't know whether this is still in the realm of mdadm's
responsibility, or whether some other package (linux-image-*?) should
be responsible instead.

> The only thing I dont understand is why it is only us two
> experiencing this.

I thought I found more than our two reports for this whole problem
suite, but then, this problem only seems to pop up for people who were
upgrading fairly often. See eg. #586449, which seems to be related to
me.

> When rebooting I have the same behaviour as what you described first;

Now *this* sounds dangerous: Failing to reboot for a newly-installed
system. This means that re-installing a box wouldn't fix the problem,
but only recreate it.

> The system complains about the missing vg and comes up with a lot of
> /sys/devices/virtual ... messages, then asks for the disk-passphrase,
> goes into a longer thinking period and after another block of
> /sys/devices/virtual/... messages the vm actually boots without any
> further problems.

My system's "thinking period" was ended by OOM-killer because something
ate all my RAM. I already submitted messages which included tracebacks
which I can't make too much sense of right now.

> to the actual boot process starting, the vm consumes 150% of my
> processors. Some things are going in an endless loop there?

Sure, and leaking lots of memory underway...

> I use the same architecture as you are: amd64 with a dual core processor.

I have a quad-core (945), plus I run an i386 system with the -bigmem
kernel on top of it, as I also have 8gigs of RAM in my box.

I didn't dare to turn the machine off since it last took so long to
boot, but (of course) would like to.

> The VM is set up as amd64 as well. It does not make a difference if I
> run the vm with one or two processors (only that with one processor
> the vm consumes 100% of that processor while boot is failing, cant do
> more, can it? ;) )

I can't inspect my system very well, but from the sound of the fans,
the CPU must be sizzling hot.


Kind regards,
--Toni++