Puppy 4 Slow PMount

[smog]

For anyone that may be interested my HP laptop takes about 3 minutes to probe all the hardware when I click on the Pmount Puppy Drive Mounter icon.

I am using the 2.6.25 kernel Puppy 4 which I know is only for testing but this is the result of me testing it!!

I can post some analysis (dmesg lspci etc) if anyone wants me to

smog

[alienjeff]

I'd be curious to see what your results are by switching the engine on Pmount.

[Jesse]

Hi smog,

How many cd/dvd drives have you got?
They are the devices that take the longest amount of time to scan, when they have a disc in them.
Switching the enging for PMount over to use mut may reduce the time.

Jesse

[alienjeff]

@Jesse

MUT is, and always has been, the faster engine. Thank you for that!

[smog]

I don't know how to change the engine without first launching Pmount and using the switch engine button.

Once I have used Pmount once and it has taken several minutes to work it does then work faster a second time so I can't test this without changing to MUT first.

BTW I have only one cd drive and all previous Puppies have scanned the drives in this laptop in seconds


smog

[Jesse]

Hi smog,

If you would like to try mut from the command line without using PMount, type in /usr/sbin/mut
If you would like to trap all the debug output from mut, to see which device is having the delay, you could try this command:
/usr/sbin/mut --noserv --debug --nothreads > output.txt
The number on the left is number of seconds (and miliseconds) since 1970, when you see a big jump in the numbers, it may be obvious as to which device the problem is with.
The 'greater than' symbol means "redirect the output to that file", so that you can examine it in a text editor, there is lots of output. If you would like to attach the output to a post here, I can advise you on what problem(s) mut faced.

Regards
Jesse

[smog]

Hi, thanks I've done that.

MUT was no faster but the output clearly shows a big delay, I must admit I don't understand what is being done there.

I would appreciate your thoughts.

smog

[alienjeff]

Have you tried using Pmount from within the standard kernel release of Puppy v4.00? Results?

[Jesse]

Hi smog,

It doesn't look so good, I don't think its going to work for you.
Its probably just a bug in a kernel driver that means it doesn't understand your piece of hardware correctly.

The device with the issue is your /dev/sdb

From the output.txt, here mut opens a file handle to the /dev/sdb
attempts to read from it, and 131 seconds later the read operation fails with "Input/output error".

1211807174.224: VERBOSE: THB7E2D8D0 s->fd=3
1211807305.358: VERBOSE: THB7E2D8D0 read ==-1 from /dev/sdb at pos=0 pos=0x00000000 sctr=0
1211807305.358: ERROR: THB7E2D8D0 reading file /dev/sdb errno(5):"Input/output error".
1211807305.358: PROBLEM: THB7E2D8D0 read of 512 bytes only got -1

Its kind of odd, because the first 512 bytes contains the partition table, and if it can't be read from how does the kernel manage to determine that there is a sdb1? mut shows sdb1 is in /proc/partitions

1211807305.359: VERBOSE: THB7E2D8D0 read line: 8 16 sdb 4 2 48 262276 0 0 0 0 0 131140 262276
1211807305.359: VERBOSE: THB7E2D8D0 read line: 8 17 sdb1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0

My guess is that there is a bug in the kernel code or driver somewhere. If you don't have problems with the other Puppy kernels you might have to stick with them to use your /dev/sdb

Anyway, to prevent the 131 second pause in your current version of Puppy, you will have to physically unplug the device, power and data cables.

Regards,
Jesse

[smog]

Jesse,

That is spot on, my sdb is a PCMCIA card reader, I unplugged it and Pmount was back to normal loading up in about 1.5 seconds.

This is absolutely no problem because I only put that card reader in so I don't lose it, I never use it on my system!!!!

Thanks very much for your help, I am now happily using Puppy 4

smog