Sugar on a Stick

SoaS blueberry stick becomes corrupted, refuses to boot with "tried to remove a fb that we didn't own"

Bug #498390 reported by Mel Chua
20
This bug affects 4 people
Affects Status Importance Assigned to Milestone
Sugar on a Stick
New
Undecided
Unassigned

Bug Description

Sugar on a Stick Blueberry, created with livecd-iso-to-disk.sh using the --efi option to boot on a Mac. It has booted and run successfully on this Mac, but suddenly, one time when we went to boot it, it...

 1. Showed the "Automatic boot in 3... 2... 1..." countdown
 1. Showed the Sugar Labs logo with circles going around it, got to 5 circles successfully, and then went to this error message:

[drm:drm_mode_rmfb] *ERROR* tried to remove a fb that we didn't own

Boot has failed, sleeping forever.

It responds to keyboard input - we can type on the screen - but the typing doesn't do anything.

This happens when the stick is tried on the Mac (which worked before), a Classmate PC (known to boot many SoaS sticks), and a Thinkpad x200 (known to boot many SoaS sticks).

This error has been seen by Mel Chua, Sebastian Dziallas, and Caroline Meeks.

Revision history for this message
Thomas C Gilliard (satellit-) wrote :

Same message earlier from sh script created USB where .iso was too small (incomplete)

Did someone remove USB stick before writes completed on shutdown? I wait 2+ Minutes after shutdown is complete, especially if no led to see writes on USB/SD

Revision history for this message
Bernie Innocenti (codewiz) wrote :

Boot most probably fails because the ext3 filesystem becomes corrupted when it fills up, I could reproduce it on two different computers, with two different sticks.

The writable overlay is implemented as an LVM snapshot which lives in a separate file. My guess is that the snapshot runs out of empty pages and then starts reporting errors to the filesystem layer. To avoid further data loss, ext3 will refuse to mount if there are uncommitted entries in the journal that can't be replayed.

All the relevant error messages are being suppressed by the quiet boot and we only end up seeing a spurious "tried to remove a fb that we didn't own", which is just a red herring.

I propose that we upstream this bug to the Fedora folks.

Revision history for this message
Ray Baquirin (rayb) wrote :

I encountered this bug with blueberry on a 2GB stick with ~750MB overlay. The hang occurred while doing "yum -y update". I then killed the power. Attempting to boot the stick resulted in the error message given above.

Same process with blueberry on a 4GB stick with 1.5GB overlay works fine.

Revision history for this message
rapidoo (flebris) wrote :

Same problem after physical shutdown when sugar not responding (no space left available),

Revision history for this message
David Kergyl (dcargille) wrote :

I had a similar problem when I created an SoaS on a 1-Gb flash drive. I automatically updated the existing activities and downloaded some more, as well as some PDF ebooks. It is possible to create a non-compressed USB SoaS that will know when it runs out of space. See additional discussion at http://bugs.sugarlabs.org/ticket/1798.

Revision history for this message
David Kergyl (dcargille) wrote :

See also [https://answers.launchpad.net/soas/+question/101934 Answer 101934]

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