The UDEV Problem

So another ongoing problem I'm having is the issue of UDEV not starting properly. When I boot, the process will hang at "Starting UDEV...." and sit there for about 4 minutes, until it times out.

The boot process will continue at this point, until it gets to "Loading HAL", at which point it will hang again for another 2 minutes.

At one point, the problem seemed to go away automagically, and the computer booted about as fast as a moderately bloated Windows boot -- which for Linux, is lightning. But then I made the mistake of running the system update. In addition to breaking a bunch of other things, it also blew up my UDEV groove, and the computer was back to aking around 10 minutes to reach a usable desktop.

It would be nice if there was some way to track what UDEV is doing during the boot process, but there isn't.

Problem: UDEV hangs at "Starting UDEV", waits for timeout, stalls again at "Starting HAL daemon"

Reproducable: always
How to Reproduce: Boot the computer
Workaround: Sit there and wait

Steps to troubleshoot:

1. Read piles of man pages and comb through forums, Write a few questions into forums, which were ignored. Read more man pages. Google progressively, trying new searches every time I learned a new word.

2. Downloaded and learned to use a program called "bootchart" (http://www.bootchart.org/). After wrangling with it for several hours, I learned from it that there was a long delay while UDEV "waited for devices to settle".

There was not much information available about what this means, or how to tamper with this process. Most of the info obtained by googling "waiting for devices to settle" found the phrase in forum posts by people whop were also exasperated with UDEV for some reason or other.

There are also some tools available for managing UDEV here: http://linux.die.net/man/8/udevadm. But these are all intended to be used after the computer has performed the glacial task of starting up. There are no tools for looking into UDEV during the boot process.

3. Tried to look around the computer for some explanation of what was happening.

There is a good page of how to write UDEV rules here: http://www.reactivated.net/writing_udev_rules.html. The guy who wrote this is apparently the Lao_Tze of UDEV, since most forum posts about problems with UDEV will refer readers to this guide. Too bad it isn't much help for resolving issues with out of the box UDEV problems.

There is a lot of info about how udev works in general. But to the average user, not much of it means anything. And again, the screed assumes that the reader is trying to create new problems for himself, not solve existing ones. There is no identifiable information about what UDEV is doing while it boots.

It did give me the idea of going through /etc/udev/rules.d and renaming the files one by one in the hope of finding the problem rules file. After about 2 hours I had managed to test about 4 files and got bored. I then copied the entire rules.d directory to a usb stick, and deleted everything except the files that were necessary.

Specifically, I was after 60-pcmcia.rules, for one. I read a lot of posts pointing to it as a likely culprit.

More later ...

More:

1. It seems likely that any problem manifested as a UDEV error happened somewhere else first, since UDEV gets things passed on to it from other programs. I read about this is Border's last night and can't remember the details.