Running 16.04 on dell xps13. I have several mounts called out in /etc/fstab, but some of them get skipped. It feels like a systemd timing problem but that’s a guess. The skipping is intermittent. Sound familar to anyone? The latest kernel reduced the frequency of this happening but didn’t eliminate it. Haven’t seen it happen on my slower laptops. TIA for any suggetions.
Don’t know if it would help, but for other reasons, I have Automount turned off in Disks for all my partitions under “Mount Options”.
I then tick the “Mount at startup” and “Show in user interface” boxes for the partitions I want to see and use.
Thanks @Cobber, i never used mate-control-panel/Disks before. Nice to be able to set up the funky options for mount through a GUI, i knew where to look it up but never got around to it. Now maybe the stuff Caja presents that i don’t want to look at will take up less space.
Anyway, although i haven’t rebooted to test it, i don’t think it’s going to affect the skipped-mounts issue, i’m fairly well convinced that the missed mounts are due to some timing issue between systemd and whatever is processing fstab during init. There’s a systemd command to display the boot log, but i don’t recall it offhand and forget where i stashed that info on disk. I haven’t had grand luck with the GUI search tools i’ve found (except for medit’s find-in-files) but once i remember what the command is, next time it fails i’ll capture some data.
Thanks again for the tip about Disks. The whole GUI “control center” concept started seems to have been improving over the past couple years or so. Long-time linux users know how to be linux administrators because they had to know that, but i just want to get some work done, so the less i can learn and still get the job done, the happier i am.
Not sure if your suggestion affected it or not, but it seems possible that either reducing the number of mounts or something in the rev-66 kernel affected things, the last few boots have been working okay. In any event reducing the number of seldom-used drives shown in the Caja side-pannel is an improvement for sure. Thx.
Glad to hear things are working so far, touch wood. Yes, I only mount the partitions I actually want access to. I have a shared Windows partition I use, but I don’t want to see the other Windows partitions or Linux partitions I have for other distro’s.
I also think it is much safer changing things in Disks rather than manually editing fstab. You never know what else needs to be updated.
I’ve been going nuts with this thing. Boots failing 3 out of 5 times, blah de blah blah.
BUT, i think maybe i’ve figured it out.
It appears to me that systemd is using the swap area to store data that speeds booting. Now, i don’t know this to be a fact, but based on all the evidence i’ve been able to collect, i believe it to be the case.
I’m running an xps-13 with UM-16.04, UM-17.04, Debian jessie, Debian wheezy, and Ubuntu oneiric all on multi-boot.
And until this morning, when the proverbial light-bulb lit, and i added two more swap partitions so that the three systems i have occasion to boot regularly have dedicated swap partitions, i was using a single swap partition for whatever distro was booted. Since i run jessie to do backups (due to PHP and ncurses issues) i’m flipping distros at least twice a day, which explains why the UM swap partition would have gotten messed up. I already knew the swap partition was used for hibernation data (so i don’t use hibernation), but jessie clearly has no problems with a swap partition used by UM, so systemd must’ve changed since that level.
Now i’m seeing clean boots, from hitting the grub enter-key to login screen in maybe 3 seconds. So i’m going to attempt to flag this as “solved” if i can figure out how to do that.
There is no checking to make sure that the swap device is dedicated, and i believe that changes to systemd since the debian-jessie level (somewhere upstream in the RH neighborhood) have made it essential that it be checked somehow; if systemd is storing data it ought to be storing a sha256 or something to make sure it hasn’t been messed-with by some other distro before using it. I’ve been using linux since about the oneiric level and don’t recall ever even seeing a warning about the requirement that a distro have a dedicated swap partition, so maybe i’m all wet. I think it’s a systemd issue fwiw, but hopefully i’m done with this issue.
Thanks all.