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

[Robert Davies]

On Saturday 20 Sep 2003 06:07, Godfrey Nix wrote:
> 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)

That's all you need to do for /sys.

> 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.

initrd's aren't mandatory (yet), but a way to load modules at boot time, by 
having them loaded into a RAM disk, using BIOS calls from a boot loader.  
Stale initrd's can actually cause problems, if you load in modules which are 
now compiled in, the results are undefined.

It looks like you've missed compiling something in that's necessary to  mount 
the root filesystem.  Double check your kernel config, really does have the 
right IDE chipset, IDE drivers and anything xfs requires compiled in.  If 
you're sure then check http://kerneltrap.org/node/view/799, which gives a 
check list of minimum package versions to run 2.6, and goes through the 
upgrade process.  It's actually very simple the main change being use of 
module-init-tools replacing modutils.

Rob