More debian questions noone will probably answer :D

[Jerome Alet]

On Wed, Nov 21, 2007 at 12:01:51PM -0700, RB wrote:
> > It appears that the kernel 2.6.18-5 doesn't wait long enough for the SAS 5iR
> > card to 'settle down' before attempting to mount the filesystems/etc.
> 
> Presuming that's the kernel.org 2.6.18-5, it doesn't have the
> SCSI_SCAN_ASYNC option (default compile-time set of async SCSI
> scanning), but that doesn't preclude you from having
> 'scsi_mod.scan=async' in your kernel arguments.  I'm not a fan of
> Debian, so I can't tell you defaults one way or the other - probably
> why I ignored any earlier posts about Debian as well.
> 
> A quick and dirty fix would be to add 'rootwait' as a kernel argument.
>  A more appropriate one would be to dig down into your kernel config
> and figure out what set of options are causing this behavior; that
> depends on your willingness to compile a custom kernel.

I was hit with the very same problem after a kernel upgrade under 
Debian, and I switched back to the older kernel to finally be able 
to boot. 

>From reading your answer, do I understand correctly that without 
'rootwait' the kernel doesn't wait for the device containing the 
root filesystem to be available before continuing the boot process ? 

If yes, then could someone explain to me what is the purpose of 
booting a kernel with no root filesystem ? And if this is possible 
why would anyone with common sense make this the default behavior ? 

Thanks in advance.

Jerome Alet