[Gllug] My kernel's got no initrd! How does it boot? Terribly.

[John Winters]

John Winters wrote:
[snip problem booting new kernel on Debian Squeeze]
> which ran without errors and then I installed the resulting .deb.  The 
> odd thing is though that my new kernel has no initrd, and as a result 
> doesn't boot.  Is there some recent change to the kernel building process?

For the record, I've sort of discovered how to work around this.  There 
seems to be some sort of disagreement between the Debian installer, 
grub2, and the kernel build process which means that currently 
home-built kernels don't get installed quite properly by default.

After installing a new kernel you need to run:

update-initramfs -c -k <kernel-version>
grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg

before you re-boot.

I found a bug about it in the Debian bugs system but it's been marked 
"wishlist" (!) and although I've found references to "change some 
configuration files" I've yet to discover what these changes are.

The grub-mkconfig step does happen automatically as part of the kernel 
installation, but the update-initramfs step doesn't, and so you need to 
run the grub-mkconfig step again manually.

Posted to save someone else time if they should hit the same problem and 
try to search for the solution.

Cheers,
John
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