Bug 90387

Summary:	RFE: Improve error reporting when CONFIG_FHANDLE kernel config not enabled
Product:	systemd	Reporter:	Erik de Castro Lopo <erikd+cairo>
Component:	general	Assignee:	systemd-bugs
Status:	NEW ---	QA Contact:	systemd-bugs
Severity:	normal
Priority:	medium
Version:	unspecified
Hardware:	All
OS:	Linux (All)
Whiteboard:
i915 platform:		i915 features:

Description Erik de Castro Lopo 2015-05-10 11:18:46 UTC

Spent 6+ hours debugging why an Arm board that that I installed Debian on wasn't booting. In the end it turned out that /home and swap were not mounting because the kernel for this board did not have CONFIG_FHANDLE enabled.

If a Linux kernel has a /proc/config.gz psuedo file it would be trivial to search that for kernel config items that systemd depends on.

Comment 1 Erik de Castro Lopo 2015-05-10 11:31:13 UTC

Somewhere deep in the internals of systemd some system call must have been failing because of the lack of the CONFIG_FHANDLE feature. That failure should have been reported up the stack.

Comment 2 Lennart Poettering 2015-05-11 10:08:58 UTC

Please see README before building systemd or the kernel for the use with systemd. This is documented there. When building such a low-level component it's essential to read what's documented there.

Comment 3 Erik de Castro Lopo 2015-05-11 10:22:10 UTC

I did *not* build systemd from source and hence did not read the readme.

I had an Ubuntu 14.04 install for this board (Odroid xu3) on a micro SD card and from that setup I used debootstrap to install Debian on an SSD drive, using the kernel from Ubuntu.

Seeing as I installed systemd as a package (along with over 100 other packages), at what point would I read the readme file that ships in the source code tarball?

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