boot failures on very-large systems with CONFIG_SYSFS_DEPRECATED not set

Doug Chapman doug.chapman at hp.com
Mon Aug 25 18:27:16 UTC 2008


Sometime leading up to the F9 kernel my very large ia64 system (64 cpu
1TB ram, bunch of PCI busses and I/O) fails to boot.  It appears to be
something in how nash/mkinitrd gets information from sysfs.  Since this
is an early boot-time issue and nash isn't very easy to debug I am
having trouble getting to the root of the issue (but I am still
investigating).

I have however found what change triggered this.  The default config
file used to have CONFIG_SYSFS_DEPRECATED=y set.  Upstream kernel commit
d47846c5866b7d98a1173c86a39d810a06647329 renamed this to
CONFIG_SYSFS_DEPRECATED_V2.  It appears the default is still "y" however
somehow with the transition the Fedora kernel now has this off.

If possible I would like to see this get set to "y" for now.  I will
continue to debug this as it certainly _should_ boot just fine without
this set.  Even if we just turn it on for ia64 that works for me (but I
imagine some new big x86_64 systems may run into it once they grow this
large).

thanks,

- Doug





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