This may actually be a usrmerge problem, both usrmerge and usr-is-merged
(>= 38~) are installed). But I do not know enough about how firmware
controllers are loaded during boot to determine which package, dbus or
usrmerge, I should submit a bug report to.
We have multiple old (14+ years) Tyan S3950 mobo servers running debian
Unstable with various recent kernels, the latest being 6.1.0-3-amd64.
Despite being on the bleeding edge with the unstable distro, this has
been a very reliable setup over the years. I love Debian. However,
after a recent update, we had to reboot a couple of servers and both
booted with NO network or usb console keyboard. ie, completely unusable.
I have been able to mount the failed server HDs on another server and
compared dmesg logs from the failed and last successful boots. The
failed boots were not detecting the floppy (I told you they were old)
and not loading the kernel piix4_smbus driver. These are the key lines
present in the earlier good boots and missing from the failed boots:
...
Floppy drive(s): fd0 is 1.44M
piix4_smbus 0000:00:02.0: SMBus Host Controller at 0x580, revision 0
...
A failed boot did not have the above lines and subsequently failed to
detect and enable the network interfaces, the console USB keyboard or
any other usb devices.
FWIW, the 3ware RAID drivers are still loading fine in the bad boots. So
some drivers are still loading.
I think this problem stems from the ongoing Debian move to a merged-/usr
system. I have fully and successfully (I thought) installed both the
usrmerge and usr-is-merged (>= 38~). The only hint I have is the last
dbus package update contained a warning about assuming that a system is
fully merged-/usr system "In the case of dbus, the symptom when this
assumption is broken is particularly bad (various key system services
will not start"...which sums up my problem quite nicely.
I will be happy to submit a formal bug report to the appropriate package
using reportbug as soon as someone with way more knowledge than I tells
me which package would be more appropriate to receive it. The last thing
I want to do is create unnecessary work for anyone in the Debian community.
Thank you in advance for any help in fixing this problem.
--
Andy Dorman
Ironic Design, Inc.
AnteSpam.com
