[Bug 910379] Re: Gparted does not start and continues to scan devices

[Curtis Gedak]

> On 1/5/2012 4:05 PM, Curtis Gedak wrote:
>> Phillip, are you able to bring this problem with blkid searching non-
>> existent floppy drive to the attention of the right people?
>
> I don't think it is considered a bug by anyone. If the bios claims you
> have a floppy, then the kernel thinks you have a floppy. If you try to
> access the floppy, the the kernel tries it's hardest to access it, even
> though it keeps failing.

I do agree Phillip that the root cause of the problem is an incorrectly
configured BIOS.  Having said that, it would be nice if blkid could
handle this situation better instead of scanning for a very long time.

Another reason to bring this to the attention of the blkid people is
that according to Carla, the previous versions of blkid does not appear
to exhibit this behaviour.  Hence this looks like a recently introduced
change/problem.


> > In the past if I changed the label of a partition with GParted and then
> > called blkid, I received the cached result which was the old label.
> > That is why I used the "-c /dev/null" to force blkid to re-read the
> > information.
> >
> > I have not tested to see if blkid still has this same behaviour.
>
> Right, if you call it before udev has had a chance to run it to update
> the cache, that would happen. If you are changing the label, why don't
> you just update your cached label directly instead of querying blkid again?

The main reason to not update the GParted cache directly is that then we
won't know if the label write really succeeded.  The only way to be sure
the label was written correctly is to physically re-read the label from
the disk.  By re-reading the disk label we can learn if the label was
truncated or not written for some reason.

Regarding waiting for udev to update it's cache, do you think a "udevadm
settle" would be sufficient before a call to "blkid" to ensure that has
up-to-date information?

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/910379

Title:
  Gparted does not start and continues to scan devices

Status in “gparted” package in Ubuntu:
  In Progress

Bug description:
  I have Precise Pangolin Alpha 1 with all updates installed.
  When launching Gparted it continues to scan for devices and never starts.
  I tried as normal user, as root, with and without a usb key attached.

  ProblemType: Bug
  DistroRelease: Ubuntu 12.04
  Package: gparted 0.8.1-1ubuntu4
  ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 3.2.0-7.13-generic 3.2.0-rc7
  Uname: Linux 3.2.0-7-generic x86_64
  NonfreeKernelModules: nvidia
  ApportVersion: 1.90-0ubuntu1
  Architecture: amd64
  Date: Sat Dec 31 16:18:08 2011
  ExecutablePath: /usr/sbin/gpartedbin
  InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 9.10 "Karmic Koala" - Release amd64 (20091027)
  SourcePackage: gparted
  UpgradeStatus: Upgraded to precise on 2011-12-02 (28 days ago)
  XsessionErrors:
   (polkit-gnome-authentication-agent-1:2143): GLib-CRITICAL **: g_once_init_leave: assertion `initialization_value != 0' failed
   (nautilus:2148): GConf-CRITICAL **: gconf_value_free: assertion `value != NULL' failed
   (gnome-panel:2275): Gtk-WARNING **: cannot open display: :1.0

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