Re: Regression - SATA disks behind USB ones on v4.8-rc1, breaking boot. [Re: Who reordered my disks (probably v4.8-rc1 problem)]

From: Pavel Machek
Date: Sun Aug 14 2016 - 08:03:37 EST


Hi!

> > > > I have no idea how "SATA before USB" had been done in the past (if it
> > > > was ever a thing in the kernel), but that has not been the case since
> > > > at least v3.0 AFAIR.
> > > >
> > > > >
> > > > > People may not run udev, and you can't use /dev/disk/by-id on kernel
> > > > > command line.
> > > > >
> > > >
> > > > No, but you can always use root=PARTUUID=, that's built into the
> > > > kernel. (root=UUID= requires udev or so though).
> > >
> > > Silly me. root=UUID= has nothing to do with udev, but `blkid` in
> > > util-linux. At least that's how it's done in Arch/mkinitcpio.
> >
> > The rule is "don't break working systems", not "but we are allowed to break
> > systems, see it says here not to depend on this"
> >
> > Drive ordering has been stable since the 0.1 kernel [1]
>
> Drive probing order of USB has always been non-deterministic, so while I
> agree that it is not good to break existing systems at all, perhaps this
> is on the edge of what works vs. doesn't work?

Yeah, USB order is known to be random. But root=/dev/sda (when sda is
on SATA) is very old, and it would be good to keep it.

> I know my USB drives always seem to come up in random order, which is
> why tools like udev were invented :)
>
> > It takes a lot longer to detect USB drives, why in the world would they be
> > detected before hard-wired drives?
>
> Depends, some hard-wired drives take much longer to find than USB ones.
>
> That being said, it would be great if the original reporter could use
> 'git bisect' and let the linux-usb and linux-scsi mailing list know what
> the offending patch is, and we can take it from there.

Original reporter is me :-(.

Yes, I can do bisect, if required. I'd like some kind of confirmation
that it happens on other systems...

Best regards,
Pavel
--
(english) http://www.livejournal.com/~pavelmachek
(cesky, pictures) http://atrey.karlin.mff.cuni.cz/~pavel/picture/horses/blog.html