upstart (/sbin/init) fails to start many /etc/init and /etc/rc2.d files
Affects | Status | Importance | Assigned to | Milestone | |
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NULL Project |
Invalid
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Undecided
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Unassigned | ||
mountall (Ubuntu) |
Incomplete
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Medium
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Unassigned |
Bug Description
A virgin install of 10.4 was failing to start many of the items in /etc/init and /etc/rc2.d, or least that was the symptom.
Example: at the end of boot the getty processes on /dev/tty[1-6] where _often_ not present.
Example: my home-made entries in /etc/rc2.d apparently did not run (and they have worked for years).
What's different? This is may first AMD 64-bit quad-processor and it runs very much faster than anything I've ever had before.
(Many days of debugging.)
I think the problem is that Upstart's tendency to run many things in parallel means that sometimes subtle dependencies can get caught by race conditions. E.g if event A completes before event B starts, all is well, but the other order causes problems.
My get-around has been to add the init='/sbin/int --verbose' to the linux /boot/vmlinuz/... line in /boot/grub/grub.cfg by
making my own menuentry item in /etc/grub.
See man 8 init .
This seems to have the effect of slowing down Upstart, and possibly single-threading some of the startups (because they are held back by the queue of messages to the console?).
((Once again, adding the debugging printout _prevents_ the problem you are trying to debug.))
At this point I'm happy to just leave the --verbose option in, since now my machine seems to boot reliably.
Suggestion: Upstart needs a formal --single-thread option to get around just this sort of problem. Give me a slow boot that always works any day!
I've marked the security vulnerability box because any security boot script that does not run properly could be a problem.
Please provide more evidence of these "failures", for example error logs, /var/log/boot.log, etc. Read http:// www.chiark. greenend. org.uk/ ~sgtatham/ bugs.html
Upstart is designed to *prevent* race conditions, if you are experiencing some, we'd like to fix them. Upstart does not need a "single thread" option