[ I sent the following message to Bill and to anaconda-devel-list.
Unfortunately, the attachments made it longer than 40 KB, and th
"mailman" program held back the message.
Rather than spam all of your mailboxes with attachments which
may only be of interest to some, I've put them up on the web.
The attachments referred to in the body of the text can be found
at:
http://augart.com/Linux/Anaconda-2006-May/anaconda-11.0.5-1-DebugHack-3mazu.patch
http://augart.com/Linux/Anaconda-2006-May/anaconda-11.0.5-handleKernelModule.patch
http://augart.com/Linux/Anaconda-2006-May/mazu-anaconda.spec ]
On Tue, 2006-05-09 at 22:24 -0400, Bill Nottingham wrote:
> So, looking at the code briefly, I suspect that kickstartfromCD
> needs to iterate over the devices (and check for NULL.) Or not probe
> the USB bus. (in kudzu parlance, USB CDs are SCSI.)
>
> Try the *completely untested* patch attached. It may need some fudging.
Dear Bill,
Thanks for the suggestion. Your patch is essentially equivalent to the
one that I used to get to the Python stage of the installer; in both
cases, we detect these NULL values and have kickstartFromCD warn the
user and return the failure value of 1.
Unfortunately, once I'm in the Python stage, that stage crashed and
offered me an anacdump.txt file. I've attached it so that others who
are CC'd on this correspondence can make use of it; I doubt it has much
to do with the Kudzu issue that you and I are attempting to address and
fix.
I've also attached the complete patch that I have successfully used to
get past the crash in /sbin/loader on Anaconda, since others on
anaconda-devel-list may encounter the same problem. The patch is
against Anaconda 11.0.5 instead of against the CVS head, since I was not
able to get the CVS head to build disks; there must have been internal
changes that broke the scripts I've been using (a variant of Dan
Carpenter's scripts).
When you have a chance to look at the USB devices list dump I sent you,
please let me know if I can provide more helpful information. For
Mazu's internal purposes (of getting an installer to work on the blade
center), I can probably add some kludges that will detect the CD ROM and
will use mknod() to create the appropriate block device in /tmp so that
we can read the ks.cfg file off of the CD. However, I'd certainly
prefer to make the changes be more generally useful to other users of
libkudzu.
At this point, the major blocker for our using FC5's Anaconda as the
installer for our Linux-based network security appliance is the crash in
the second-stage Python code.
Steven
