RHEL 7.4 Guest systemd/libgudev1 update and (audio ?) boot delay

[gbohn]

Hi;

  Running RHEL 7.4 as a Guest under VMWare Workstation 12.5.7, I just recently applied an update to systemd and libgudev1. Now, when I boot I get a stall of over a minute during the boot. It seems like this might be related to the audio driver. (The host is Windows 7 64-bit with a realtek audio). I am running open-vm-tools-10.1.5-3.el7.x86_64.

  In the guest, running 'systemd-analyze blame', it seems to show a boot delay in 'systemd-udev-settle'.

  2min 330ms systemd-udev-settle.service

  5.268s plymouth-quit-wait.service

  Looking at the current /var/log/messages, I see some suspicious entries from around the time of the boot stall:

Nov 3 14:57:36 xxxxxxxx systemd: Received SIGRTMIN+20 from PID 246 (plymouthd).

Nov 3 14:58:33 xxxxxxxx systemd-udevd: slow: '/bin/sh -c 'echo 180 >/sys$DEVPATH/timeout'' [2878]

Nov 3 14:58:34 xxxxxxxx systemd-udevd: worker [527] /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:11.0/0000:02:02.0 is taking a long time

lspci seems to say that 02:02:0 is related to the sound

02:02.0 Multimedia audio controller: Ensoniq ES1371/ES1373 / Creative Labs CT2518 (rev 02)

The sound is not working after boot now, but disconnecting and reconnecting the sound card in 'removable devices' seems to fix things.

This seems to have been somehow triggered by the systemd update when I updated systemd to systemd-219-42.el7_4.4.x86_64 and libgudev1 to

libgudev1-219-42.el7_4.4.x86_64

libgudev1-219-42.el7_4.4.i686

This all seemed to work without a problem back at systemd-219-42.el7_4.1.x86_64. 

Anyone know if there is a compatibility problem with this systemd update and the guest audio driver?

Thanks;

[mhampto]

As far as the boot delay, does this happen if the sound card is removed? Have you tried removing the driver and the card and running a reinstall?

Some information here may help Enabling Sound Blaster AudioPCI device in VMware Workstation and Fusion (2010400)

[gbohn]

As far as the boot delay, does this happen if the sound card is removed? Have you tried removing the driver and the card and running a reinstall?

I tried removing the audio card from the Virtual machine settings, and the boot delay went away. I added the audio card back, and the delay returned.

Some information here may help...

I tried adding a line to the .vmx for

sound.virtualDev = "hdaudio"

bit there was still a boot delay. Changing this to

sound.virtualDev = "es1371"

didn't seem to help either.

The sound doesn't work immediately after boot, but if I Go into Removable devices / sound card and disconnect the card, then reconnect it things seem to work.

Restoring a snapshot with the prior 4.1 systemd stuff and the sound works fine. I don't know if there's a bug in the 4.4 systemd, or if maybe the driver load timing/order got changed because of the new version.

I can think about trying to create a new Guest VM to see if it also shows the same issue. But, getting that up to speed as a replacement for the one that's not working properly would be a long, arduous process.

At the moment, I've been avoiding applying the 4.4 updates hoping that a fix will come along.

Thanks;

[gbohn]

Just as an update for anyone else who might experience a similar issue.

After many days rebuilding a replacement Guest, it appears as though the replacement/reconstructed guest (installed from 7.4 media) does not show the same problem.

The original problematic Guest started out life as RHEL 7.2 I believe, and has been updated over time. So, it appears that something about that (updated over time) guest is different than the new Guest as far as this problem is concerned.

I don't know why that particular update triggered an issue on the 'old' guest. Maybe some latent damage (or difference) from its history.