unknown filesytem type: spufs - causes installation failure

During boot up of intrepid alpha it mentions that spufs is an unsurpported file system.

Perhaps somebody on the kernel team could help with this? There are related logs in bug 261490 (which I haven't marked as a duplicate because it shows other problems, but nevertheless). The kernel used is 2.6.25-1-powerpc64-smp, which seems to ship with the spufs module. My understanding was that sys_mount would automatically load modules when necessary. However, this doesn't seem to be happening in this case. To me that suggests a kernel bug - could you confirm and investigate?

The Ubuntu Kernel Team is planning to move to the 2.6.27 kernel for the upcoming Intrepid Ibex 8.10 release. As a result, the kernel team would appreciate it if you could please test this newer 2.6.27 Ubuntu kernel. There are one of two ways you should be able to test:

1) If you are comfortable installing packages on your own, the linux-image-2.6.27-* package is currently available for you to install and test.

--or--

2) The upcoming Alpha5 for Intrepid Ibex 8.10 will contain this newer 2.6.27 Ubuntu kernel. Alpha5 is set to be released Thursday Sept 4. Please watch http://www.ubuntu.com/testing for Alpha5 to be announced. You should then be able to test via a LiveCD.

Please let us know immediately if this newer 2.6.27 kernel resolves the bug reported here or if the issue remains. More importantly, please open a new bug report for each new bug/regression introduced by the 2.6.27 kernel and tag the bug report with 'linux-2.6.27'. Also, please specifically note if the issue does or does not appear in the 2.6.26 kernel. Thanks again, we really appreicate your help and feedback.

The newer kernel doesn't solve this issue. The "install base system" step during installation of Ubuntu fails configuring package initscripts due to the error: "unknown filesystem type: spufs".

I investigated this a little this morning using my proposed linux-ports kernel update [0]. Once the machine has booted and I logged in I found that the spufs kernel module is available but isn't loaded for some reason. Consequently the /spu kernel filesystem isn't mounted.

I was able to load the module using modprobe without error and I was then able to manually mount the /spu filesystem. But I couldn't create directories below it (as described in Arnd's arcticle [1]) even as root. However I need to go back and revisit this later as I may have made an error somewhere.

Next I need to work out why the spufs module isn't getting loaded.

[0] https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-cell/2008-September/000179.html
[1] http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/power/library/pa-cell/

> But I couldn't create directories below it (as described in Arnd's
> arcticle [1]) even as root. However I need to go back and revisit
> this later as I may have made an error somewhere.

You won't be able to mkdir in the spufs mount point - only the spu_create system call will be able to create entries in spufs (the article is a little old).

If you'd like to test that spufs is working, the spufs testsuite might be handy:

 http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/jk/spufs-testsuite.git

Jeremy - thanks. Excellent test suite very helpful. I was able to run the tests. Plenty failing, one even caused a "Badness" message in dmesg. I will raise issues about these separately.

Basically there isn't any problem loading spufs and mounting /spu manually so for now I'm going to presume the failing tests are separate issues to this. Next I will try to work out why the spufs module isn't getting automatically loaded.

Setting priority to critical as we can't install until this is resolved either by fixing or temporarily disabling the mount on boot.

This bug was fixed in the package sysvinit - 2.86.ds1-59ubuntu6

---------------
sysvinit (2.86.ds1-59ubuntu6) intrepid; urgency=low

  [ Dan Munckton ]
  * debian/initscripts/postinst: Keep going if mounting /spu fails
    (LP: #251593, #261490).

 -- Colin Watson <email address hidden> Wed, 24 Sep 2008 14:50:04 +0100