QNX 6.3 copy protection won't allow safe mode - cannot run c

QNX Newsgroups (Archives) qnx.rtos
1

Had a problem (to be described separately) with QNX 6.3
that required a reboot. Decided to boot in safe mode
(F1, F4) to run chkfsys.

Received the following message:

“No valid commercial license found”
“Only non-commercial use of this software is permitted”.
“Contact QNX Software Systems to acquire a development license”

“Spawn of /bin/sh failed - no such file or directory”.

Then, nothing. No prompt. Input ignored.

This is repeatable.

The system will boot up normally into Photon, but not in safe mode.

That is not a good thing.

John Nagle
Team Overbot

2

On Tue, 31 Aug 2004 21:26:33 -0700, John Nagle <nagle@overbot.com> wrote:

Had a problem (to be described separately) with QNX 6.3
that required a reboot. Decided to boot in safe mode
(F1, F4) to run chkfsys.

Received the following message:

“No valid commercial license found”
“Only non-commercial use of this software is permitted”.
“Contact QNX Software Systems to acquire a development license”

“Spawn of /bin/sh failed - no such file or directory”.

Then, nothing. No prompt. Input ignored.

This is repeatable.

The system will boot up normally into Photon, but not in safe mode.

That is not a good thing.

I have duplicated this here…
A customer also complained about the same thing.

–
Using Opera’s revolutionary e-mail client: http://www.opera.com/m2/

3

On Wed, 01 Sep 2004 08:45:28 -0700, John Nagle <nagle@downside.com> wrote:

Thank you for reproducing this defect.

Just to make it clear-I’m just another user, not from QNX.
In addition to this post, you may want to take this up
directly with your sales contact…

4

inn.qnx.com wrote:

On Tue, 31 Aug 2004 21:26:33 -0700, John Nagle <> nagle@overbot.com> > wrote:

Had a problem (to be described separately) with QNX 6.3
that required a reboot. Decided to boot in safe mode
(F1, F4) to run chkfsys.

Received the following message:

“No valid commercial license found”
“Only non-commercial use of this software is permitted”.
“Contact QNX Software Systems to acquire a development license”

“Spawn of /bin/sh failed - no such file or directory”.

Then, nothing. No prompt. Input ignored.

This is repeatable.

The system will boot up normally into Photon, but not in safe mode.

That is not a good thing.


I have duplicated this here…
A customer also complained about the same thing.

Thank you for reproducing this defect.

It is not acceptable for copy protection to interfere
with basic system operation. This could take down an
operational system and leave it unrecoverable. It’s
done that for our test system. Copy protection must
come out of the low-level system. Protection of the
development tools is acceptable, but there must be no
vestige of this copy protection in any component used
in a real time application.

I am somewhat annoyed over this. I will refrain from
using stronger language at this time.

John Nagle
Team Overbot

5

Alex/Systems 104 wrote:

On Wed, 01 Sep 2004 08:45:28 -0700, John Nagle <> nagle@downside.com> > wrote:


Thank you for reproducing this defect.


Just to make it clear-I’m just another user, not from QNX.
In addition to this post, you may want to take this up
directly with your sales contact…

It’s clearly an issue for all, even those just hobbying have to deal
with filesystem corruption from time to time.

6

I didn’t make that clear. We’re fully licensed. But
apparently, in safe mode, without the file systems mounted,
copy protection can’t see the license and doesn’t like that.

John Nagle
Team Overbot

Evan Hillas wrote:

It’s clearly an issue for all, even those just hobbying have to deal
with filesystem corruption from time to time.

7

John Nagle wrote:

I didn’t make that clear. We’re fully licensed. But
apparently, in safe mode, without the file systems mounted,
copy protection can’t see the license and doesn’t like that.

Yep, I know, I was just adding in another angle for having this thread
continue to it’s conclusion. And many other commercial developers will be
very concerned too, I bet.

8

John - I think that diskboot is your enemy here. Try making a
non-diskboot image for now.

Note that license issue appears to be a red-herring. Diskboot only
issues the message if it can’t find a license, nothing is disabled.

Someone will look into this problem…

John Nagle wrote:

Any chance of an answer on this before the Labor Day weekend?
I hate to lose three more days of schedule.

John Nagle
Team Overbot

John Nagle wrote:

Had a problem (to be described separately) with QNX 6.3
that required a reboot. Decided to boot in safe mode
(F1, F4) to run chkfsys.

Received the following message:

“No valid commercial license found”
“Only non-commercial use of this software is permitted”.
“Contact QNX Software Systems to acquire a development license”

“Spawn of /bin/sh failed - no such file or directory”.

Then, nothing. No prompt. Input ignored.

This is repeatable.

The system will boot up normally into Photon, but not in safe mode.

That is not a good thing.

John Nagle
Team Overbot

–
cburgess@qnx.com

9

Any chance of an answer on this before the Labor Day weekend?
I hate to lose three more days of schedule.

John Nagle
Team Overbot

John Nagle wrote:

Had a problem (to be described separately) with QNX 6.3
that required a reboot. Decided to boot in safe mode
(F1, F4) to run chkfsys.

Received the following message:

“No valid commercial license found”
“Only non-commercial use of this software is permitted”.
“Contact QNX Software Systems to acquire a development license”

“Spawn of /bin/sh failed - no such file or directory”.

Then, nothing. No prompt. Input ignored.

This is repeatable.

The system will boot up normally into Photon, but not in safe mode.

That is not a good thing.

John Nagle
Team Overbot

10

Colin Burgess wrote:

John - I think that diskboot is your enemy here. Try making a
non-diskboot image for now.

Note that license issue appears to be a red-herring. Diskboot only
issues the message if it can’t find a license, nothing is disabled.

Someone will look into this problem…

The real problem, as mentioned previously, is

“Spawn of /bin/sh failed - no such file or directory”.

Then, nothing. No prompt. Input ignored.

There’s no way to get into safe mode.
Either the copy protection system is preventing boot into
safe mode, or safe mode itself is broken.

Right now, we only have the QNX 6.3 development
system on a spare PC. The rest of the project
remains on QNX 6.21. I was hoping for a quick upgrade
performed over one weekend, but this just became a
much longer-term project. We’ll be staying with 6.21
for a while.

John Nagle
Team Overbot

11

John Nagle wrote:

There’s no way to get into safe mode.
Either the copy protection system is preventing boot into
safe mode, or safe mode itself is broken.

F1 F3 safe mode seems to work fine.


For a bit more completeness, F5 debug shell is also affected in the same manner as F1 F4 safe mode.

Here’s a copy of the output …
…
“Remounting Complete”
“Starting /proc/boot/devc-con -n4”
“All filesystems are mounted. Type “exit” to exit the shell and continue.”
“Starting /proc/boot/fesh”

And to quote you John: Then, nothing. No prompt. Input ignored.

12

Wierd. But reproduceable, so it will get fixed.

Does F1 F3 get you to a point where you can run
“chkfsys” safely? If so, that’s enough to get us going
again.

John Nagle
Team Overbot

Evan Hillas wrote:

John Nagle wrote:

There’s no way to get into safe mode.
Either the copy protection system is preventing boot into
safe mode, or safe mode itself is broken.



F1 F3 safe mode seems to work fine.


For a bit more completeness, F5 debug shell is also affected in the same
manner as F1 F4 safe mode.

Here’s a copy of the output …
…
“Remounting Complete”
“Starting /proc/boot/devc-con -n4”
“All filesystems are mounted. Type “exit” to exit the shell and
continue.”
“Starting /proc/boot/fesh”

And to quote you John: Then, nothing. No prompt. Input ignored.

13

F1 F3 yields a mode in which the file systems are mounted.
As the help page says:

The chkfsys utility should be used only when the filesystem is stable.
There should be NO files open for writing when chkfsys is running.

You CAN run “chkfsys” from the F1 F3 state, but it does NOT lead
to a clean file system. I’m unable to reach a state where
“chkfsys” reports no errors. If I reboot and rerun it again,
I see problems caused by daemons which have been started up.
The F1 F3 “safe mode” mounts all file systems, runs
the “rc.local” file, and even starts up “lpd”.
That’s not “safe” enough for “chkfsys”.

So it seems that if a QNX 6.3 system crashes, no simple
recovery is possible.

John Nagle
Team Overbot

John Nagle wrote:

Does F1 F3 get you to a point where you can run
“chkfsys” safely? If so, that’s enough to get us going
again.

John Nagle
Team Overbot

Evan Hillas wrote:

John Nagle wrote:

There’s no way to get into safe mode.
Either the copy protection system is preventing boot into
safe mode, or safe mode itself is broken.




F1 F3 safe mode seems to work fine.


For a bit more completeness, F5 debug shell is also affected in the
same manner as F1 F4 safe mode.

Here’s a copy of the output …
…
“Remounting Complete”
“Starting /proc/boot/devc-con -n4”
“All filesystems are mounted. Type “exit” to exit the shell and
continue.”
“Starting /proc/boot/fesh”

And to quote you John: Then, nothing. No prompt. Input ignored.

14

John Nagle wrote:

Wierd. But reproduceable, so it will get fixed.

Does F1 F3 get you to a point where you can run
“chkfsys” safely? If so, that’s enough to get us going
again.

It looks like all the default stuff except Photon gets run
as normal. Run chkfsys?, yep. Safely?, dunno.

15

Evan Hillas wrote:

John Nagle wrote:

Wierd. But reproduceable, so it will get fixed.

Does F1 F3 get you to a point where you can run
“chkfsys” safely? If so, that’s enough to get us going
again.



It looks like all the default stuff except Photon gets run
as normal. Run chkfsys?, yep. Safely?, dunno.

Opps, took too long testing that one, you know, went to sleep, did
something else. :wink:

16

John Nagle wrote:

F1 F3 yields a mode in which the file systems are mounted.
As the help page says:

The chkfsys utility should be used only when the filesystem is stable.
There should be NO files open for writing when chkfsys is running.

You CAN run “chkfsys” from the F1 F3 state, but it does NOT lead
to a clean file system. I’m unable to reach a state where
“chkfsys” reports no errors. If I reboot and rerun it again,
I see problems caused by daemons which have been started up.
The F1 F3 “safe mode” mounts all file systems, runs
the “rc.local” file, and even starts up “lpd”.
That’s not “safe” enough for “chkfsys”.

So it seems that if a QNX 6.3 system crashes, no simple
recovery is possible.

Resolved?

17

We haven’t heard anything.

This is apparently a problem with overly aggressive
copy protection in “diskboot”, which runs so early
that a workaround is tough. We may have to wait
for the next release of QNX. Our QNX 6.3 test system
sits idle, awaiting a fix.

We continue to use QNX 6.21 for real work. It’s working
well for us. We demonstrated our robot vehicle to about
30 people today, in our first public demo. Some well known
Silicon Vally names were present.

We may just stay with QNX 6.21, rather than fighting
with the copy protection in 6.3. It eats up too much
of our time.

John Nagle
Team Overbot

Evan Hillas wrote:

John Nagle wrote:

F1 F3 yields a mode in which the file systems are mounted.
As the help page says:

The chkfsys utility should be used only when the filesystem is stable.
There should be NO files open for writing when chkfsys is running.

You CAN run “chkfsys” from the F1 F3 state, but it does NOT lead
to a clean file system. I’m unable to reach a state where
“chkfsys” reports no errors. If I reboot and rerun it again,
I see problems caused by daemons which have been started up.
The F1 F3 “safe mode” mounts all file systems, runs
the “rc.local” file, and even starts up “lpd”.
That’s not “safe” enough for “chkfsys”.

So it seems that if a QNX 6.3 system crashes, no simple
recovery is possible.



Resolved?

18

Any progress on this?

John Nagle
Team Overbot

19

Very interested in the outcome of this.

20

First, my apologies for not getting to this sooner. I only
became aware today…

At first glance I would agree with Colin that the license
issue is not related (it would be related to the mounting
diskboot does when running in safe mode). It would appear
that diskboot is broken w.r.t. to the debug shell and/or
safe mode.

I have run in safe mode to get to a standard login many times,
typically when I mess up my Photon settings. I have yet to
see this problem. Though it looks easy to reproduce.

I’m looking into it and will post my findings shortly.

I will also investigate how to improve the usability of the safe
mode to make it really safe. I’m thinking along the lines of
standard *nix single user mode. One console, no extra drivers
beyond what is in the boot image.

BTW, there is a sample build file in the helpveiwer documentation
which performs the same basic functionality as diskboot. I believe
it is in the Neutrino User’s Guide Appendix (Examples). This would
not help in this case since the drivers and other services are started
via etc/system/sysinit, not diskboot.

Thanks,
Keith Russell


John Nagle wrote:

We haven’t heard anything.

This is apparently a problem with overly aggressive
copy protection in “diskboot”, which runs so early
that a workaround is tough. We may have to wait
for the next release of QNX. Our QNX 6.3 test system
sits idle, awaiting a fix.

We continue to use QNX 6.21 for real work. It’s working
well for us. We demonstrated our robot vehicle to about
30 people today, in our first public demo. Some well known
Silicon Vally names were present.

We may just stay with QNX 6.21, rather than fighting
with the copy protection in 6.3. It eats up too much
of our time.

John Nagle
Team Overbot

Evan Hillas wrote:

John Nagle wrote:

F1 F3 yields a mode in which the file systems are mounted.
As the help page says:

The chkfsys utility should be used only when the filesystem is stable.
There should be NO files open for writing when chkfsys is running.

You CAN run “chkfsys” from the F1 F3 state, but it does NOT lead
to a clean file system. I’m unable to reach a state where
“chkfsys” reports no errors. If I reboot and rerun it again,
I see problems caused by daemons which have been started up.
The F1 F3 “safe mode” mounts all file systems, runs
the “rc.local” file, and even starts up “lpd”.
That’s not “safe” enough for “chkfsys”.

So it seems that if a QNX 6.3 system crashes, no simple
recovery is possible.



Resolved?