Re: USB storage no-boot regression (bisected)

[Mark Lord]

Arjan van de Ven wrote:
> On Thu, 16 Apr 2009 11:51:53 +0100
> Alan Cox <alan@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> > > > Though it's an onboard USB SSD, not a pluggable stick.
> > > Wow, that's insane.  Leave it to a hardware designer to use a bus
> > > that you never know if you have discovered all the devices to be
> > > the primary device to boot from.
> > Let me see:
> >
> > - Standardised small component
> > - Low pin count and low wire count bus
> > - Cheap
> >
> > In an embedded environment where you know the device is wired in at
> > software level that strikes me not as insane but very sensible.
>
> I'm not surprised usb is used for storage. What I am surprised at is
> that USB is used in such high end environments that rootwait is not
> sufficient and that the panic-rebooter is needed for the reliability.
..

Failover and redundancy are standard requirements for really reliable systems.
As good as a component may be, there's always anticipation that it will fail
someday, and multiple ways of detecting/overcoming failures must be built-in.

In this case, imagine *two* such SSDs.
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