Re: boot hangs, corruption at every attempt

[Riccardo Mottola]

Hi,

Justus Winter wrote:
> Quoting Samuel Thibault (2015-04-01 13:25:27)
> > Riccardo Mottola, le Wed 01 Apr 2015 13:20:05 +0200, a écrit :
> > > using my HURD instance in VirtualBox shows it is extremely unreliable. It
> > > almost always hangs at boot.
> A also see the occasional hang at boot, not at this point though, but
> either earlier on (happens only very rarely nowadays), or later
> preventing the login prompt from showing up (I suspect a problem with
> /hurd/term).
Could it be console? After the hang, I re-entered recovery mode, the 
filesystem was still marked as clean. I forced a manual fsck and it did 
find an error on the ACL of /dev/console, fixed that, at the next reboot 
I could login.


> > Note: I don't recommend using VirtualBox.  It tends to implement hacks
> > to make simulation faster at the expense of correctness.  Things work
> > just fine with qemu/kvm/native.
> Better for sure, I wouldn't say just fine.  The issue Riccardo
> encounters here is the one we have the delay loop hack in
> runsystem.sysv for :/

I'd love, far prefer native. But my two older boxen I could "dedicate" 
to HURD don't work. You both endured the many posts I gave here.
I had a quite fine workin box, but it is low on mem... so my install 
attempts were done from an temporary computer on the HD and now I 
discovered that GRUB appears to have troubles (It did not a year or so 
ago). But I was uable to understand the problems, I asked on the GRUB 
Mailing list without replies.
I also have a laptop, but there I get no network. You suggested wifi, 
but I don't have the tools for it installed.
I'll make another GRUB attempt on the old box and find perhaps another 
laptop with integrated network (but also enough RAM since we are very 
demanding, most spare old laptops with fine supported hardware have 
256MB of RAM...)

So since I wanted to tinker with GNUstep on HURD after such a long 
delayed, I just ordered more RAM and put VirtualBOX on my Mac. For Linux 
VirtualBox worked always quite fine.
If Justus speaks of a hack, it is maybe just the bug being exposed.

Since it appears tightly related with the FS (I was able to boot with 
one or several reboots into recovery and forcing fsck) I am clearly 
concerned that the shutdown is never clean, so it all adds up creating 
uncertainty.

Can we understand why my shutdown is not clean?

Riccardo