Mailing List Archive

xen on debian - boot problems
Hi,

I've got xen installed on debian. And everything is just fine as long as
I boot an (old) 3.16 kernel as dom0.

When I try to boot a kernel 4.11, 4.19 or 5.2 (dom0) under xen
hypervisor booting falls back to busybox with the message:

    Gave up waitng for root file system device

When I boot just debian without xen there's no problem at all with any
of these kernel versions.

And of course I already searched the web and I found that a lot of
people experience problem with xen in combination with an adaptec raid
controller. And as I'm using an Adaptec 8405 controller, I suspected it
to be the bad guy. But: there does not seem to be a problem with aacraid
kernel module. When I drop to busybox (trying to boot with xen
hypervisor) and have a loot at the modules I get

# lsmod | grep aacraid
aacraid                87960  1
scsi_mod              195357  3 aacraid,libata,sr_mod

When I boot with xen and kernel 3.16 (which works) I get:

# lsmod | grep aacraid
aacraid                87960  4
scsi_mod              195357  5 sg,aacraid,libata,sd_mod,sr_mod

So at least there's no problem in loading the aacraid module. Any Ideas?

Cheers

Widu

--
Dr. Christian Wittekindt
Institut für Physikalische Chemie
Albertstr. 23a
79104 Freiburg
Tel. 0761-2035131



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Re: xen on debian - boot problems [ In reply to ]
Hi Widu,

On 8/12/19 3:37 PM, Christian Widu Wittekindt wrote:
>
> I've got xen installed on debian. And everything is just fine as long as
> I boot an (old) 3.16 kernel as dom0.
>
> When I try to boot a kernel 4.11, 4.19 or 5.2 (dom0) under xen
> hypervisor booting falls back to busybox with the message:
>
>     Gave up waitng for root file system device

I have one piece of "been there done that" experience that I can think
of: sometimes a raid controller can take a few seconds to initialize and
present the disks to the OS after powering up. I had to use rootdelay=10
in this case. But, I would suspect that in this case you would see the
same failure when booting without Xen. So, just a random thought.

> When I boot just debian without xen there's no problem at all with any
> of these kernel versions.
>
> And of course I already searched the web and I found that a lot of
> people experience problem with xen in combination with an adaptec raid
> controller.

And what kind of problems are those?

> And as I'm using an Adaptec 8405 controller, I suspected it
> to be the bad guy. But: there does not seem to be a problem with aacraid
> kernel module. When I drop to busybox (trying to boot with xen
> hypervisor) and have a loot at the modules I get
>
> # lsmod | grep aacraid
> aacraid                87960  1
> scsi_mod              195357  3 aacraid,libata,sr_mod
>
> When I boot with xen and kernel 3.16 (which works) I get:
>
> # lsmod | grep aacraid
> aacraid                87960  4
> scsi_mod              195357  5 sg,aacraid,libata,sd_mod,sr_mod
>
> So at least there's no problem in loading the aacraid module. Any Ideas?

Yes, post full dmesg output of both starting with and without Xen.

Hans

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Xen-users mailing list
Xen-users@lists.xenproject.org
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Re: xen on debian - boot problems [ In reply to ]
Hi Hans,

thanks for answering to my post.

Am 17.08.19 um 12:14 schrieb Hans van Kranenburg:
> Hi Widu,
>
> On 8/12/19 3:37 PM, Christian Widu Wittekindt wrote:
>> I've got xen installed on debian. And everything is just fine as long as
>> I boot an (old) 3.16 kernel as dom0.
>>
>> When I try to boot a kernel 4.11, 4.19 or 5.2 (dom0) under xen
>> hypervisor booting falls back to busybox with the message:
>>
>>     Gave up waitng for root file system device
> I have one piece of "been there done that" experience that I can think
> of: sometimes a raid controller can take a few seconds to initialize and
> present the disks to the OS after powering up. I had to use rootdelay=10
> in this case. But, I would suspect that in this case you would see the
> same failure when booting without Xen. So, just a random thought.
Well, the timeout happens after waiting to minutes. But I tried adding a
rootdelay anyway, but that didn't change a thing.
>
>> When I boot just debian without xen there's no problem at all with any
>> of these kernel versions.
>>
>> And of course I already searched the web and I found that a lot of
>> people experience problem with xen in combination with an adaptec raid
>> controller.
> And what kind of problems are those?
Well there's reports of boot-loops (not my problem). And theres reporst
of aacraid not initializing (e.g.
https://lists.debian.org/debian-user/2018/08/msg00598.html.
>
>> And as I'm using an Adaptec 8405 controller, I suspected it
>> to be the bad guy. But: there does not seem to be a problem with aacraid
>> kernel module. When I drop to busybox (trying to boot with xen
>> hypervisor) and have a loot at the modules I get
>>
>> # lsmod | grep aacraid
>> aacraid                87960  1
>> scsi_mod              195357  3 aacraid,libata,sr_mod
>>
>> When I boot with xen and kernel 3.16 (which works) I get:
>>
>> # lsmod | grep aacraid
>> aacraid                87960  4
>> scsi_mod              195357  5 sg,aacraid,libata,sd_mod,sr_mod
>>
>> So at least there's no problem in loading the aacraid module. Any Ideas?
> Yes, post full dmesg output of both starting with and without Xen.

I attached  dmesg outpout with xen booting and kernel 5.2 (doesn't find
rootfs -> drops to busybox) xen booting with kernel 3.16 (which works
just fine) and debian booting witout Xen with kernel 5.2.

Widu



--
Dr. Christian Wittekindt
Institut für Physikalische Chemie
Albertstr. 23a
79104 Freiburg
Tel. 0761-2035131