boot failures on very-large systems with CONFIG_SYSFS_DEPRECATED not set

[Jarod Wilson]

On Monday 25 August 2008 14:27:16 Doug Chapman wrote:
> 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).

Just committed the change to flip those on for ia64-only.

-- 
Jarod Wilson
jarod at redhat.com