[Nottingham] Future events (And 2.6-test5 problems)

[Godfrey Nix]

On Sat, 2003-06-07 at 05:34, Philip Scott wrote:

> PPPS - I'm trying to get 2.6-test5 to work proplerly, and I can't for the life 
> of me get it to understand my root partition. Every time I boot it, I get 
> 'Kernel panic unable to mount root fs'. I've tried with root= all manner of 
> things (including some obscure numeric values I found somewhere on a debian 
> mailing list archive that correspond, somehow, to device names - anyone have 
> any ideas?). I've even taken out my RAID card, so there's just my ide 
> chipset, and it is detected proplerly by the kernel, there are messages to 
> the effect of
> hda: ibm whassname superdrive
> hdc: AOPEN CD/RW
> 
> I think the problem may be either something to do with the mystical 'sys' 
> directory I am supposed to have (I have made one on my root, but done nothing 
> more than that) and perhaps the fact that my root filing system is XFS (yes, 
> I remembered to compile it in, although I forgot the first time ;)
> 
> Any ideas anyone?
> 
> Kind regards,
> 	Philip

When you build a kernel, you actually create two, the main kernel, and
an initrd image. It is the job of the initrd to load at boot time and
then load the rest of the system. So initrd must have the correct
drivers in it to be able to read the root partition. As it is a
'stripped down' version, you do not get all the drivers even though you
compiled them all. See the man page for mkinitrd to see how you can
force extra drivers into it.

Godfrey