Another hang at bootup fixed

This has been so fustrating. We had Xorg crashing after the desktop was running:

"Found cause crash Compaq Presario"
https://bkhome.org/news/202507/found-cause-crash-compaq-presario.html

...that I fixed by compiling libpciaccess with the patch.

Fixed, but what has been really frustrating is hanging sooner, before Xorg runs. It turned out that the 'pidof' utility was hanging:

"udevd timeout fixed"
https://bkhome.org/news/202508/udevd-timeout-fixed.html

After the above fixes, Easy Excalibur has been booting OK consistently, until this morning. Now, it is hanging, while executing /etc/rc.d/rc.sysinit, and doing it consistently, every bootup. Why the sudden change from booting Ok to hanging?

I discovered that the 'swapon' utility, called in rc.sysinit, is hanging. Why?

Easy Daedalus, built with Devuan/Debian Daedalus/Bookworm packages, on the same computer, boots OK. It runs swapon on the same swap partition. Yet, poweroff and boot Easy Excalibur and swapon hangs.

I fixed it in rc.sysinit by running the busybox swapon instead, line 119:

  busybox swapon $ONESWAP

So, the big question, why are busybox utilities working, the full ones are hanging? Years of developing Puppy Linux, Quicky Linux and EasyOS, never had this problem.

The important point here, I think, is that the busybox I am using was compiled by me with musl, linked statically. Debian has a statically-linked busybox deb, but not using that.

Something new in Devuan/Debian Excalibur/Trixie is "t64". I don't know what else could be the cause. Have no idea how t64 could cause utilities to hang, and these are utilities from the Debian Trixie package repository, so they should have been compiled to be OK with t64.    

Tags: easy