[Gllug] initrd images & building 2.6.x kernels

[Adrian McMenamin]

On Sun, 2005-09-11 at 16:32 +0100, Sarah Ewen wrote:
> Hi folks,
> 
> I've spent the weekend building 2.6.10+ kernels and have come to the
> conclusion that I'm missing some basic knowledge about initial ramdisks.
> 
> I'm pretty sure I need an initrd img, particularly as I'm trying to
> build the suspend2 patch on it, and need all my ide support as modules,
> as far as I'm aware.
> 
> However, before I even get to booting kernels patched as above, I'm
> having issues just trying to build plain and simple 2.6 kernels with
> initrd imgs.
> 
> I build the kernel, put it & the matching System.map into /boot, and
> then run mkinitrd -o /boot/initrd.img kernel-version and then edit
> grub.conf to list the new kernel and it's initrd.img file.
> 
> But just about every kernel I've built has rendered me helpless with a
> kernel panic: unable to mount root FS on unknown-block(0,0).
> 

2.6 natively supports a mechanism called "initramfs" or "Early User
Space" that aims to replace initrd. You can read a short guide (with a
link to something longer) wot I wrote myself at:
http://www.linux-sh.org/cgi-bin/moin.cgi/Using_20Early_20User_20Space



It is not clear from your email whether you are building all this from
scratch or using a new kernel on top of somebody else's distro. Fedora
(which I use on ia86 boxes) still seems to use initrd



> 
> Sarah & her chaotic /boot directory.

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