On Thursday 07 November 2002 2:41 pm, Michael Holt wrote:
> Hey Simon,
> This is what I did:
>
> cd to /usr/src/2.4.19-xx
>
> make mrproper (didn't bother saving .config since I
> hadn't put anything in it yet.)
> edit makefile changing extraversion to 'mikescustom'
> delete /lib/modules/2.4.19-xx (as instructed to if you're not patching
> your kernel)
> make menuconfig (load /boot/config)
> make dep
> make clean bzImage modules
> make modules_install install
>
> I'm think that since I'm changing the extraversion entry in the makefile
> that it should create a new modules directory under /lib/modules and that
> I may not have to delete the old one - at least then I should be able to
> do the work around, which is 'modprobe loop'. I tried restarting service
> devfsd last night, but there was no rescuing from where I was at, so I
> reloaded mdk 9.0 and I'm planning to try rebuilding again today. Any
> thoughts on that plan of action? I would love any suggestions.
>
> Thanks, Mike
Hi Mike,
I wouldn't recommend deleting the default installed modules. I always just
change the makefile extraversion and that leaves the new modules installed in
their own directory. This way if your reboot fails then at least you still
have the originals to fall back on. If you've already deleted them you might
try forceing a reinstallation of the mandrake kernel to get them back.
On your original problem of mkinitrd, did you include TCP/IP networking(under
Networking options)? I think I'm correct in saying that this contains the
loop device mentioned in Documentation/initrd.txt that is required for
initrd. Having said that, I manage to boot my kernel without initrd (I have
removed the line in the section of lilo.conf "initrd=/boot/initrd..." from
where I boot my kernel). I just made sure that IDE/UDMA and ext3 drivers that
I use for my root disk partition were compiled into the kernel. It seems to
work fine for me and both simplifies and speeds up the boot process.
If you can get your kernel compiled with whatever drivers are needed to mount
the root file system and if you can install any modules(after adjusting the
makefile extraversion to suit) with make modules_install, then perhaps you
could just copy the bzImage to /boot/vmlinuz-whatever along with the system
map and then make manual entries in /etc/lilo.conf to boot that kernel and
forget about an initrd entry. Don't forget to run lilo after all this to
update the mbr!!!!
As far as I understand, initrd's main purpose is to enable the loading of
whatever modules are required to mount the root file system. If those are
already compiled into the kernel then basically initrd is not required to
mount the root file system.
Hope this helps,
Robin
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