Comment 43 for bug 537133

I'm joining this discussion late (I'm not really affected as my diskless clients are all ro+aufs), so please let me know what I'm doing wrong in my testing and which other information I can provide.

The improvement in quantal and raring compared to precise is limited. It doesn't hang any more, but it still doesn't successfully remount /.

On all three releases, with 'rw' in the kernel command line, mountall spawns 'mount /', it returns immediately, and the system boots successfully.

On precise, with 'ro' in the kernel command line, I don't know for sure what happens as mountall hangs and never offers to drop to a shell. (Is there some way to get a rescue shell?)

On quantal and raring, with 'ro' in the kernel command line, mountall never spawns 'mount /' (although it does send the mounting event; I suppose that's the part where it's waiting for statd?) and /tmp waits forever for /. I do, however, get the offer to skip mounting or drop to a shell, so I'm able to recover the output from mountall. If I drop to a shell and run mountall, booting finishes successfully.

I don't see any difference between 'local-filesystems' and 'virtual-filesystems' in /etc/init/statd.conf, on any release.

I also don't see any difference from adding 'nolock' to the options in fstab, which I thought was supposed to make it work. Is there an extra step I'm missing? It's definitely visible in mountall's info about /.