Comment 93 for bug 539515

>> But what does the detects change mean? It has no way to detect whether
>> it has media or not???
>
>Right, that's why the value is 0.

Yes, now I remember that's the way floppy drives work. Once a program wants to read, the drive just tries to access the floppy, whether one is inserted or not. You could hear these read attempts well. (I haven't had a floppy drive for a while)

But if this is the case the whole automount doesn't make sense for floppies. There is no way to tell when a floppy was inserted, so there is no way to start mounting it automatically when it happens.

But automount by nautilus comes in 2 flavors:

1.) at application start all existing media will be mounted.

2.) later newly inserted media will be mounted

These 2 cases can be easily found in nautilus source file nautilus-application.c

1.) function automount_all_volumes

2.) function volume_added_callback

For this report we are only interested in case 1.)

So there are two options to make things work nicely:

a.) you never call the automatic mount for a floppy
(that's also like the lower level automatic mount with -a option does it. Floppies have the option noauto in /etc/fstab, so they will be skipped)

or

b.) if you call mount it must fail rather quickly

I don't know how nautilus handled this earlier.

But there is a clear difference in how fast a mount fails in Jaunty and Lucid

Jaunty (that's the oldest LiveCD I had handy. I know that the problem did not exist in Intrepid, because
I had Intrepid on this machine before Lucid. But I didn't have an Intrpid LiveCD handy now)

(added /dev/fd0 line to /etc/fstab manually to enable user mount)

$ time mount /dev/fd0
mount: block device /dev/fd0 is write-protected, mounting read-only
mount: I could not determine the filesystem type, and none was specified

real 2m10.679s
user 0m0.000s
sys 0m0.008s

The time is very much the same for repeated attempts, both user mounts and root mounts

Lucid: (Tested in LiveCD and normal disk installation)

$ time mount /dev/fd0
mount: block device /dev/fd0 is write-protected, mounting read-only
mount: I could not determine the filesystem type, and none was specified

real 18m17.583s
user 0m0.008s
sys 0m0.016s

Again the time is repeatably the same for both user and root.

So the mount "timeout" has changed from 2 minutes to nearly 19 minutes!!!

For me the only clear symptoms are

- disk light steadily on during the mount attempt
- error messages in syslog once or twice a minute during the mount attempt

I'm not convinced whether there is any clear delay at boot time as some people report. And if there is one it is certainly not over 18 minutes. I can use the system during this time and see the mount process just hanging there and the errors appearing in syslog.

I believe it could be possible that the same issue has existed before, but I got never worried about 2 minutes of steady disk light. (At least part of that time the hard drive is working anyway when it starts the desktop). Or possibly the time was even shorter than 2 minutes in Intrepid.

But now in Lucid I got worried about what appeared to be 18 minutes of "steady I/O". And that's why I started to dig.