I'm joining this discussion late (I'm not really affected as my diskless clients are all ro+aufs), so please let me know what I'm doing wrong in my testing and which other information I can provide.
The improvement in quantal and raring compared to precise is limited. It doesn't hang any more, but it still doesn't successfully remount /. On all three releases, with 'rw' in the kernel command line, mountall spawns 'mount /', it returns immediately, and the system boots successfully. On precise, with 'ro' in the kernel command line, I don't know for sure what happens as mountall hangs and never offers to drop to a shell. (Is there some way to get a rescue shell?) On quantal and raring, with 'ro' in the kernel command line, mountall never spawns 'mount /' (although it does send the mounting event; I suppose that's the part where it's waiting for statd?) and /tmp waits forever for /. I do, however, get the offer to skip mounting or drop to a shell, so I'm able to recover the output from mountall. If I drop to a shell and run mountall, booting finishes successfully. I don't see any difference between 'local-filesystems' and 'virtual- filesystems' in /etc/init/statd.conf, on any release. I also don't see any difference from adding 'nolock' to the options in fstab, which I thought was supposed to make it work. Is there an extra step I'm missing? It's definitely visible in mountall's info about /. -- You received this bug notification because you are a member of AIMS, which is subscribed to the bug report. https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/537133 Title: mountall issues with NFS root filesystem Status in “mountall” package in Ubuntu: Incomplete Status in “portmap” package in Ubuntu: Fix Released Status in “mountall” source package in Lucid: Confirmed Status in “portmap” source package in Lucid: Fix Released Status in “mountall” source package in Maverick: Won't Fix Status in “portmap” source package in Maverick: Fix Released Status in “mountall” source package in Precise: Incomplete Status in “portmap” source package in Precise: Fix Released Status in “mountall” source package in Quantal: Incomplete Status in “portmap” source package in Quantal: Fix Released Status in “mountall” source package in Raring: Incomplete Status in “portmap” source package in Raring: Fix Released Bug description: Binary package hint: mountall I think I've found two bugs in mountall-2.7 related to nfsroots. This report describes both, since working around one exposes the other. The first bug is a dependency issue, circular and otherwise. Unless the nfsroot is mounted with "nolock", NFS locking depends on rpc.statd, which depends on portmap, which depends on the "local- filesystems" event (in /etc/init/portmap.conf). mountall will never provide this event because it treats the rootfs as "local" even if it's networked, for the sake of daemons that need to wait for the rootfs to be remounted rw. The problem is that portmap.conf needs access to /etc (ro), /var/run (rw) and /lib/init/rw (rw). A dependency on "local-filesystems" essentially means / and /tmp. Changing the dependency to "virtual- filesystems" would be more correct, but I'm not entirely certain that remounting / should depend on any general *-filesystems events. It gets messier in statd.conf, which doesn't call out any filesystem dependencies, yet requires portmap to be running. It tries to directly "start portmap" which fails because the mentioned filesystems aren't writable yet. Portmap and statd will start successfully later, but not in time to satisfy the rootfs dependency. The second bug is when one tries to work around the above problems by specifying "nolock" in /etc/fstab for the nfsroot. In this case we land in mountall.c at the bottom of run_mount() where the is_remote() test causes spawn() to be called with wait=FALSE. spawn() then calls nih_child_add_watch() which is supposed to eventually call back to spawn_child_handler(), but it appears to fail to connect: spawn: mount -n -a -t nfs -o remount,nolock 16.1.1.2:/export/romano / spawn: mount / [272] spawn: calling nih_child_add_watch for / init: job_process_handler: Ignored event 1 (0) for process 272 The third line is debugging I added. If spawn_child_handler() had been called, we would have seen an additional line: mount / [272] exited normally I didn't dig into libnih to figure out why this isn't working. Rather I changed the test on which wait=FALSE depends, since it seems like mountall should be waiting for the rootfs. This works, see attached patch, though it only fixes the non-ideal "nolock" case. ProblemType: Bug Architecture: amd64 Date: Thu Mar 11 01:18:06 2010 DistroRelease: Ubuntu 10.04 Package: mountall 2.7 ProcEnviron: LC_COLLATE=C PATH=(custom, user) LANG=en_US.utf8 SHELL=/bin/bash ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 2.6.32-15.22-generic SourcePackage: mountall Uname: Linux 2.6.32-15-generic x86_64 To manage notifications about this bug go to: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/mountall/+bug/537133/+subscriptions -- Mailing list: https://launchpad.net/~aims Post to : aims@lists.launchpad.net Unsubscribe : https://launchpad.net/~aims More help : https://help.launchpad.net/ListHelp