[SoaS] Failing soas at boot

[Tomeu Vizoso]

Hi Guillermo, sorry about the late reply, I'm adding the list to CC.

On Fri, Mar 12, 2010 at 20:30, Guillermo Garza
<mechanical.mime at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi Tomeu,
>
> My name is Guillermo. Two days ago, I sent an email to Sugarlab's feedback
> mailing list asking about some random boot problems in soas. Also, I saw you
> blog post on LATU, were you mention this problem as well:
>
> http://blog.tomeuvizoso.net/2010/01/week-at-latu-part-iii-more-about.html

Hmm, I'm not sure it needs to be the same problem, soas and the xo are
very different in these regards.

> I was wondering if you know more about this issue? People in the IRC channel
> told me the overlay might be overfilling, but the boot problems are
> happening in both heavily used and almost recently installed SDs, so we
> suspect the overlay might not be completely the case. We were also
> wondering:
>
> Is there a way to track down the overlay area, so as to prevent it from
> overfilling?

What could help if it's indeed the overlay getting filled, is having
$HOME in a separate partition. Older releases of SoaS were like that,
but it got changed at some point, or it's maybe some parameter of the
tool you use to write to the usb stick.

> Is this a Sugar issue, is it fixed in Blueberry or by applying a certain
> update/patch?

This seems to be lower in the stack, an interesting experiment would
be to see if it happens as well with standard fedora live images such
as:

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FedoraLiveCD

Then we would be if it's specific to SoaS or not.

> Is it a specific activity that might be leaking memory or causing some
> trouble?

Don't think so.

> By the way, you asked me for some DD dumps. How can I send them to you? I
> have several of them ~2Gb in size. I would really appreciate your help. Soas
> is working wonderfully for us, but we just have this small issue. Thank you
> very much for your attention. Waiting to hear from you soon.

I mentioned that it would be useful to someone who wanted to
understand what's going on, but I unfortunately don't have time these
days. Maybe someone from the SoaS mailing list?

Good luck,

Tomeu

> Regards,
> Guillermo Garza
>