[Tfug] Mount/Schroot Question

[John Gruenenfelder]

On Mon, Feb 16, 2009 at 11:25:02PM -0500, Charles R. Kiss wrote:
> Hey Tucson,
>
> When I type mount I get something that looks pretty excessive, I get a 
> lot of this:
>
>  (multiply by 10):
>
> /var/chroot/sid-ia32 on  
> /var/lib/schroot/mount/sid32-0451d00f-f104-4947-af9e-535381da54bd type  
> none (rw,bind)
>
><snip>
> It seems to be getting bigger over time.  I believe those very same hex  
> numbers show up during the boot process,  and there are a lot of them!
>
> I use an schroot script somewhere to start a browser; do I need to 
> include an un-schroot?

I used a similar setup last year to run aging Palm OS dev tools on my 64bit
system.  At first I had static bind mounts via fstab which was okay, but added
several extra entries to the mount output which were rarely used.

After Debian deprecated chroot in favor of schroot, I switch to that.  It has
its own config file for handling mounts and has far more capabilities.  One
thing it does, however, is mount the needed directories on demand.  There is a
noticable time penalty when this occurs, and since the programs I was running
(compilers, linkers, tools) were short lived, it was a no-go to have this
mount/unmount occur every time.  For something longer running, like a browser,
it's probably not such a big issue.

You can also run schroot specifically to mount your chroot enviroment.  Then
you do your work, then you run schroot again to unmount your environment.
This makes everything a lot smoother.

In your case... you don't mention using schroot in the latter method, so I
don't think that's the cause.  It can happen, however, if schroot has some
problem or (I think) if the program you run does something unexpected like
segfault, that schroot won't get a chance to clean up after itself.  Over time
your mtab will get polluted with all these extra bind mounts to the same
thing.  My guess is that is the problem you are having.

Also, it could very well be the mix between schroot configured and controlled
mounting and your fstab entries.  I'm pretty sure you should have only one or
the other.  Either do it once manually via fstab, or let schroot do it on
demand via its own config file.


-- 
--John Gruenenfelder    Systems Manager, MKS Imaging Technology, LLC.
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