udev action=add occasionally hangs on startup
 

Hey. Not sure how to diagnose this one, but occasionally (about least twice a week) during startup "/sbin/udevadm triggering events action=add", my computer hangs for at least 2-3 minutes, and then it will hang again during the next udev action. Normally I just do a hard power off and restart since I don't have 10 minutes to kill waiting for it, and it will boot fine. How can I figure out what's sporadically causing this, and more importantly how can I can fix this?

Thanks :)

Ok now my problem is getting more serious. I deleted the 70-persistent-rules files in /etc/udev/rules.d thinking they had a buildup or something. Changes & Hints says they are automatically regenerated by the system so you can delete them. Anyway it didn't help and it just took me three reboots to get past the "udev triggering events --action=add" part again. I haven't changed any hardware in my system, so I don't know what is causing this. Anyone know what is going on?

Have you checked your logs? Do they tell you anything about some hardware failure or failure to initialize?
Also, have you tried removing everything you can from the USB ports (webcam's come to mind)?
Ohh, and one last think, are you sure you haven't updated your kernel just before all this started?

This are all I can think of, of the top of my head..

Well my syslogs offer nothing of value to me. Are there some udev logs or something I don't know about? And my USB ports are clean, it's just keyboard and mouse right now. I have not updated or rebuilt my kernel in over a month.

Nope, no special logs that I know of... If there is something wrong it should show up when running dmesg, or viewing /var/log/syslog (and maybe /var/log/messages)

Let's get back to basics.. You said you deleted some persistent rules, and it got worse after... Do you know exactly what we're those rules about? Networking, cd/dvd, maybe something else.. Can you look and see how all of those rules are now, if they we're all recreated? (fell free to copy/paste the files here)

I cannot find anything ostensibly useful in dmesg, syslogs or messages according to the time.

I don't know that it got worse after I deleted the persistent rules files, it just didn't help any. The files were recreated but they have nothing in them now. The udev hanging problem has been happening more frequently the last couple of weeks and gotten worse it seems the last couple days. That's why assumed it was caught in a buildup of sorts.

Ok, here's one last try to help, since I don't think I know anything more about udev than you do..

Try changing the value of udev_log variable to "info" or "debug", in /etc/udev/udev.conf. After a reboot, maybe you can try and trace the hangup..

Good call. I changed the type to "info" and I get a log of what it does at startup now. Unfortunately (fortunately?) it booted ok on the reboot I just did lol, so I can only wait and see to try and track the culprit.

udev hangs at:

udevd message (SYNC) received

and that's it. It hangs on sync.

I have no clue what's going on, but it's getting unacceptable and I have no clue what I'm supposed to do outside of telling udev not to sync devices or something which probably isn't good.

Unfortunately, I have no idea what it could be.. Maybe some one else knows more about udev.. However, maybe you should post more then the last line of your log, if they are related to udev.. Usually everything can be relevant ..

Sorry from my part and hope some one manages to help you..

P.S. Have you tried running some live distro a few times to see if the problem persist across distributions (may really be a hardware failure).. !?

Obviously it's related to my hardware, but my hardware works fine when udev decides not to hang for 10 minutes. There really isn't much relevant in my logs, it's just the point where it hangs on sync, or it boots fine.