Mailinglist Archive: opensuse (2731 mails)

["Carlos E. R." <robin1.listas@xxxxxxxxxx>]

The 03.08.15 at 20:14, GarUlbricht7@xxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:

> I was aware of the 8.1 kernel problem, and the first thing I did when
> I installed 8.1 was upgrade my kernel.
> However I did not know of "barrier=none" option in fstab.

Well, if you updated the kernel patch from suse, you don't need the
barrier thing - actually, if you do it, mount will fail. They removed the
code, so trying to use it produce a parsing error. It is a way of making
sure if you have got the patched kernel or not.

By the way, the patched kernel may have problems with nvidia cards:
very very slow 3D - at least in my case.


> I now see it is is hinted at in SuSE's support knowledge base:
> http://sdb.suse.de/en/sdb/html/81_update_kernel.html but not really
> explained how to do it.

True. From their point of view the patch solved it, I guess; the fstab
thing was never really documented - not for the average user :-)

The only doc I ever saw was this email, on this list - I'l paste it, it is
short and old:

|Date:          2002.10.31 15:38
|From:          Michael Hasenstein <mha@xxxxxxxx>
|To:            suse-linux-e@xxxxxxxx
|
|See forwarded msg. below.
|
|
|-------- Original Message --------
|> He should try to mount his (hopefully) reiserfs partitions with option
|> barrier=none. A update kernel is in progress.
|
|The kernels in
|
|ftp.suse.com:/pub/people/mantel/test
|
|have the barrier feature removed. He should use one of them and report
|back if it solves the problem for him. We're still trying to verify that
|this is really the cause of the spontaneous freezes reported on some
|systems.

I never saw any thing more explicit - probably it was comented on some
other more technical list, or internal docs, I don't know. I don't even
know what the code tried to do...

I once tried to understand how reiserfs works, but I couldn't, any way :-}


> I looked at "man fstab"  and read Carlos'December post:
> http://lists.suse.com/archive/suse-linux-e/2002-Dec/0658.html
> I still have no clue.

Pity the archive has no body search - you'd found it. I just did on my
copy ;-)

> Could someone please show how my fstab table would look if
> I put in a "barrier=none"  option in it.

Ok, just for curiosity shake, here goes; I used:

   /dev/hdb6  /   reiserfs  defaults,barrier=none 1 1

And it worked. If your kernel is patched, mount will fail: so try it first
on an auxiliary partition, not the root one.

-- 
Cheers,
       Carlos Robinson