Bug#464418: initscripts does not wait for devices before swapon

[Dmitry Bogatov]

control: tags -1 +moreinfo

[2008-02-06 13:57] Eric Windisch <eric at grokthis.net>
> Initscripts does not wait for devices to become available before
> running the swapon command.
>
> On our systems, swap is rarely activated at boot, and must be done
> manually by the administrator.  On low memory systems, this can
> prevent various other on-boot scripts from executing successfully via
> init.  We have only experienced this problem on our dual quad-core AMD
> Opteron machines.  Presumably the higher performance offered by these
> machines  is more likely to trigger was is essentially a race
> condition.  We have worked around this issue by placing 'sleep 15'
> into mountall.sh prior to the swapon command; however, a proper
> permanent fix would be beneficial to all.

Sorry for extremely late reply. But better late then never?

In init scripts, swapon is called with `-a' options, that means,
that it respects noauto option in /etc/fstab. Would it satisfy your
needs? Excerpt from swapon(8):

       -a, --all
              All devices marked as ``swap'' in /etc/fstab are made available,
              except for those with the ``noauto'' option.  Devices  that  are
              already being used as swap are silently skipped.