On Tue, 2011-03-22 at 19:15 +0000, Duncan wrote: > I'm absolutely with you on that. If you don't need an initr*, it > definitely makes the whole thing simpler to avoid it (as I too have done).
I have an initrd on our firewall/fileserver here at the SOHO since I'm I'm loading the root fs from a RAID-supported, EVMS drive. I did this as a kind of proof of concept to learn how to do it, but at one point a kernel upgrade forced me to rebuild the initrd manually with a newer glibc. It was a strange problem, and a lot of work to fix. If I could diagnose and fix _that_ I reckon I can quit whining and fix the (probably relatively easy) one with my desktop boot. It's a pity that EVMS is an orphaned project, or was the last time I checked. IBM dropped it. It was and is a pretty slick system. Ubuntu uses an initrd in all their stuff. I believe it's involved in the display of their boot graphic and such. They've achieved _very_ fast boot times, though, and the loaded system is disk-based. I know a lot of Gentoo people look down on Ubuntu, but every distribution I've ever worked with has its advantages and disadvantages. Open Source is about choice :-) > Panicking is certainly understandable, particularly coming at an already > busy time of year. But that's behind us now. And simply having no time > to deal with it for a few days is something I'm sure we all deal with, > especially when there ends up a social crisis to deal with too. I'm going to nominate Jorge for sainthood! Everybody's moved on. Kudos to everybody :-) > Meanwhile, now we know the fork in the path to take. Without an initr*, > the fact that you get even a limited userspace (not just a kernel panic) > means that the kernel has the necessary drivers to get to and do the > initial load of the rootfs. I was getting a kernel panic for a while until I added a root spec to the kernel invocation in menu.lst. > The problem must be beyond that, in the > userspace config, initscripts or binaries. This is probably close to the point. Still working on our greenhouse, but soon I'll get the time to get back on the case with this problem. > At this point I'd guess something like the udev/kernel-config-deprecated- > sysfs issue someone else mentioned. Excellent shot, Duncan. I'll check it. I won't be using the 2.6.29 kernel again, as per Roman's suggestion, but 2.6.36 instead. -- Lindsay Haisley | "We are all broken toasters, but we still FMP Computer Services | manage to make toast" 512-259-1190 | http://www.fmp.com | - Cheryl Dehut |
