Comment 23 for bug 456806

I've just come across this bug. I have the following setup.
/dev/md0 is a 4 disk RAID1 array (/dev/sda1 to sdd1) mounted on /.
/dev/sda2 to /dev/sde2 are all swap partitions (sde2 is on the spare disk). In fstab all swap partitions use options sw,pri=1,ifexists. I don't think the ifexists option is having any affect.
/dev/md1 is a 4 disk RAID5 array (/dev/sda3 to sdd3)with 1 spare (sde3) mounted on /home.
When I tested a disk failure by disconnecting sda, the RAID arrays all worked fine, but I started getting errors about the swap partition on sda2 not being there. Then I got to experience the nasty effects that mountall has on nano...(same as described on vim above) and the console. Interestingly, a second console opened with ctl-alt-f2 is not affected.
It appears to me that mountall spews when it can't mount sda2 as if it is using swapon -a instead of swapon -a -e, which is what I am trying to achieve with the ifexists option in fstab.
I don't know how to pass the swapon -e option to mountall or even if it is possible, but it would at least solve part of the problem if it was.