[OLPC-devel] Re: LinuxBIOS and integrated system debug status (Friday night).

[David Woodhouse]

On Sat, 2006-08-26 at 20:58 -0400, Jim Gettys wrote:
> So, are we concluding that what I saw (that I could not mount the file
> system after a improper shutdown) is a USB problem and not a LinuxBIOS
> problem?  It sounds like we should from the information as I
> understand it. 

There are two separate problems -- one of which concerns me _far_ more
than the other.

First, there's the known fact that the ext3 filesystem code, while the
journal needs recovery, deliberately marks the on-disk filesystem with
an _incompatible_ flag rather than a read-only compatible flag. And thus
the ext2 code refuses to mount it at all, as intended.

Secondly, there's the fact that USB on this board is flaky as hell.
We've seen all kinds of problems with it, and it's why I had to switch
to LinuxBIOS when I was working on the DCON testing -- because the
Insyde BIOS just wouldn't boot from USB at all when you connected a
DCON. Similar problems were seen without a DCON connected, and also less
frequently with LinuxBIOS. That one concerns me a _lot_ more.

-- 
dwmw2