Bug 664802

Summary:	splash: hwinfo --framebuffer hangs, causing mkinitrd to fail and leaving kernel update incomplete w/ failure to boot
Product:	[openSUSE] openSUSE 11.3	Reporter:	Martin Dominguez <mhdominguez>
Component:	YaST2	Assignee:	Steffen Winterfeldt <snwint>
Status:	RESOLVED FIXED	QA Contact:	Jiri Srain <jsrain>
Severity:	Major
Priority:	P3 - Medium	CC:	ohering, sbrandt
Version:	Final
Target Milestone:	---
Hardware:	64bit
OS:	openSUSE 11.3
Whiteboard:
Found By:	---	Services Priority:
Business Priority:		Blocker:	---
Marketing QA Status:	---	IT Deployment:	---

Description Martin Dominguez 2011-01-16 07:42:40 UTC

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; en-US; rv:1.9.2.13) Gecko/20101203 SUSE/3.6.13-0.2.1 Firefox/3.6.13


This happens on my particular hardware (C2D, G31, RV790 with open-source driver radeon).  The work-around, as others have reporter, is to disable compositing, then run the Kernel update.  Then I make sure the symlinks to vmlinuz and initrd are good and that menu.lst is correct.

Basically, this could all be fixed if any kernel updates requested the user suspend compositing and not continue until that was done.

Reproducible: Sometimes

Steps to Reproduce:
1. compositing turned ON
2. YaST2 update kernel
3. hwinfo hangs; if on kernel update, mkinitrd cannot complete and no initrd is created.  The system will not boot, obviously, and big trouble occurs if the old initrd was deleted in the process.



Expected Results:  
hwinfo should complete, mkinitrd should complete, and correct symlinks should be placed for vmlinuz and mkinitrd

Comment 1 Steffen Winterfeldt 2011-02-16 09:43:19 UTC

It should not be necessary to run 'hwinfo --fr' for kernel updates.

Comment 2 Sebastian Brandt 2012-01-31 07:51:07 UTC

I have the same problem:
OpenSUSE 12.1 x64; NVidia GeForce 6600 with NVidia driver, VESA framebuffer
My workaround is to "sudo killall hwinfo" each time mkinitrd hangs for too long.

hwinfo --fr
> bios.4.2: mode info      
(runs with 100% load for as long as I let it)

Sebastian

Comment 3 Steffen Winterfeldt 2012-01-31 08:17:14 UTC

You can add hwprobe=-bios.vesa to the kernel boot options. That disables all
hwinfo calls into the video bios.

I'll sort this out properly for 12.2.

Comment 4 Olaf Hering 2013-07-11 19:15:13 UTC

Does it work for you in 12.2 or later?

Comment 5 Martin Dominguez 2013-07-11 22:47:55 UTC

(In reply to comment #4)
> Does it work for you in 12.2 or later?

yes sorry for not taking down the thread; this issue was fixed somewhere between 11.4 and 12.  12.3 rocks, great job everyone!

Comment 6 Olaf Hering 2013-07-12 12:47:58 UTC

closing