mount: / is busy?

[tivomaster]

When I patch my tivoapp I..
mount -o remount,rw /
Do the patch then
mount -o remount,ro /

When I do I get the message
mount: / is busy

Why?

[IpEvery211where]

Great one! I'm glad I can answer a question for you. This can be caused by deleting/changing a file while it is open. Mine specifically was /usr/scripts/callfixsub31.sh. The inode was still attached to the running process. You/I started the delete process, which could not be comitted until the inode was released by killing the offending process.

Chances are, in your case, the app was running?. The mod changed the inode which placed it in limbo? The readonly copy was still attached to the process and your new inode could not be comitted?

Not a bug but a feature. This allows you to make many changes to a live OS and reboot. Even if the processes won't willingly die at shutdown, the OS will kill -9 everything before unmounting the FS as cleanly as possible. We hope.

[tivomaster]

Great one! I'm glad I can answer a question for you. This can be caused by deleting/changing a file while it is open. Mine specifically was /usr/scripts/callfixsub31.sh. The inode was still attached to the running process. You/I started the delete process, which could not be comitted until the inode was released by killing the offending process.

Chances are, in your case, the app was running?. The mod changed the inode which placed it in limbo? The readonly copy was still attached to the process and your new inode could not be comitted?

Not a bug but a feature. This allows you to make many changes to a live OS and reboot. Even if the processes won't willingly die at shutdown, the OS will kill -9 everything before unmounting the FS as cleanly as possible. We hope.

Cool, Thanks for expalining it. Makes perfect sense.

[CroW]

Sorry to dig up an old thread but I'm curious.. Does this mean that leaving the root mounted as RW and then rebooting will not kill/overwrite/undo anything?
Just looking for clarification.

[IpEvery211where]

Don't leave / as r/w before rebooting. It will be mounted as read-only when booting. System mounts from the entry "/dev/hda[4|7] / ext2 ro 0 0". /etc/mtab is linked to /var/mtab. Leave it as is.

[CroW]

My question then is, when I'm hacking my TiVO and I shuffle all the files around and get the mount / is busy message, what can I do to un-busy it?

[email68]

I think you have to find what process is running before you modified the file and kill it.

I had this problem when I updated all of my tivobins with the lateset alphawolfs package. I could not remount it ro.

I ended up rebooting and that remounted it ro and took care of the busy because all of the process that were running based of files that were modified or delteted in my case were killed in the reboot.

It its just one or two processes that you can identify, try killing them if you don't want to reboot.

-email68

[CroW]

I killed everything on it except for Telnet (per the PS -a ), I waited about 10 or 15 minutes and tried to remount it RO and nothing..
After that I rebooted and whammo no hacks. bah......

[phango13]

just did the same friggin thing!!

couldn't remount read only after applying superpatch, got the mount: / is busy message

ran ps and started killing things last to first--something caused a reboot and whammo...

what's the solution?? i.e., how can you tell which process is the one that needs to be killed??

[IpEvery211where]

PM me in the next 15 minutes with your phone number and I'll call and try to help.

[CroW]

Just leave it and reboot...... As long as everything else is setup correctly you can reboot with it as RW and it will be reset to RO.

[PortlandPaw]

I've recently had this problem on my S1 DTivo for no apparent reason -- I've rebooted twice (soft, from telnet) and it still says mount: / is busy.

EDIT: Same result after a hard reboot.

Any other tips to make this go away?

[Jamie]

Any other tips to make this go away?

See if you can find an fuser binary for S1. This can tell you what processes are keeping the mount point busy. I know that the AIO package for S2 has fuser, but I don't know off hand where an S1 version can be found.