Re: Unable to do mdconfig(8) early in boot

On Mon, Aug 22, 2005 at 03:27:45PM -0700, Kevin Oberman wrote:
> I just updated my current system which had last been updated about
> Aug. 7. Suddenly profile.sh fails to run because mdconfig is returning
> an error:
> mdconfig: ioctl(/dev/mdctl): Read-only file system
> 
> It looks like it is not writable until after root is done. Why?

I haven't had time to try profile.sh on current, so I did't run into
this problem yet. Can you pinpoint on which of the mdconfig or mdmfs
statements this is happening?

> Right now, profile.sh requires fsck and must be run before root. It
> seems that starting it after root and before mountcritlocal works, but
> there may be some subtleties that I am missing that makes this a bad
> idea.

I think moving it after root would work. The only reason it is before
root is that it historically was put as early as possible in the rcorder
chain, so that it gets maximum control over the boot process. Only later
it was moved after fsck to avoid problems that showed up after an
unclean shutdown. The reason it is between fsck and root should be
interpreted as "after fsck, but as early as possible", and not "after 
fsck, and before root".

> Is the inability to create an md device before root has run a problem or
> something expected? 

I'd like to investigate this before having profile.sh executed after root
as default. After all, it is supposed to work on read-only root devices,
and the behaviour you experienced may be a bug in profile.sh.

As a side note, how is profile.sh running on -CURRENT? I had a lot of
problems with 6.1BETA: dhclient issues, problems with hangs due to
unexpected nic status changes. But then, I not only updated to 6 at
that time, I am also using a different laptop with a different nic
(before: fxp, now: bge). I'll try updating to BETA2 to see if this
improves anything.

thanks, t.