Boot hanging on SELINUX?

Question

SELINUX is disabled on this this machine (which is a CentOS instance under Xen) but the boot process gets to a point that mentions an audit and SELINUX and then hangs. Is it ever going to come back?

Registering block device major 202
 xvda: xvda1 xvda2
 xvdb: unknown partition table
device-mapper: ioctl: 4.11.0-ioctl (2006-09-14) initialised: dm-devel@redhat.com
kjournald starting.  Commit interval 5 seconds
EXT3-fs: mounted filesystem with ordered data mode.
SELinux:  Disabled at runtime.
SELinux:  Unregistering netfilter hooks
audit(1319018877.561:2): selinux=0 auid=4294967295

Or should I be paying more attention to the "unknown partition table" message?

Answer 1

A quick Google search of the "SELinux: Disabled at runtime." line came up with this similar problem.

Looks like in that case, the failure stemmed from the /etc/fstab file telling the system to mount a disk which doesn't exist. The "unknown partition table" message that you highlighted certainly seems to suggest that this might be the case here too.

Answer 2

Are you sure the domU is really hanging?

I just encountered the issue you described on my Xen setup — when running xm console, no further output was presented after the SELinux lines. But it turns out that the Xen console just stopped reporting kernel messages at that point — the kernel continued the boot process, and eventually I was able to SSH into the domU, run dmesg, and observe that there actually were kernel messages after the SELinux lines.

(I didn't have a Xen VNC console set up for that VM; connecting to that to watch the domU's VGA screen might have helped diagnose the issue.)