I've been following this discussion with interest as I've also
been having initrd problems recently with a setup that used to
work perfectly.
I haven't completely tracked it down, but for me, it seems to
be the initrd *build* that is the problem, rather than the kernel
booting the initrd.
My initrd is ext2, uses busybox as init (not using linuxrc or
pivot_root) - it is booted over the network using the pxelinux
boot loader (part of Peter Anvin's syslinux package.)
I take the same set of files and convert them into an initrd
multiple times. Some of the images will boot (every time) and
some won't - ever.
When they don't boot, the last messages on the console are:
RAMDISK: Compressed image found at block 0
Freeing initrd memory: 1197k freed
VFS: Mounted root (ext2 filesystem).
Freeing unused kernel memory: 388k freed
and then the system just hangs. When it works, the messages are
identical up to that point but continue...
init started: BusyBox v0.51 (2001.04.25-13:32+0000) multi-call binary
(etc.)
I have a complete set of files and dev nodes for the initrd in
./rootfs. They add up to about 3 MB. Nothing too unusual - busybox,
glibc 2.1.3, etc.
My build system kernel is 2.4.16, has the standard 4 MB ramdisk,
and I use the following script to create the initrd:
#!/bin/bash
rm -rf initrd.gz
umount /dev/ram
mke2fs -m0 /dev/ram 4000
mount -t ext2 /dev/ram /mnt/ramdisk
cp -a rootfs/* /mnt/ramdisk
umount /dev/ram
dd if=/dev/ram bs=1k count=4000 of=initrd
gzip initrd
If I run this script several times, the resulting "initrd.gz"
files are different each time (of course - different timestamps
and file ordering in the image). They are all about 1.2 MB.
Some of them boot and some of them don't. I can take a non-working
image, gunzip it, dd it back to the ramdisk, mount it, and
recursively diff it against the original rootfs and find nothing
wrong.
I thought this was a 2.4 kernel bug until I found that my older
2.2.19 kernel works or fails on the same initrd.gz files as the
new 2.4.16 kernel.
But I never used to have this problem when I built initial
ramdisks (using the *same* script and *same* files) under 2.2.19,
so maybe the problem is that creating initrd's on 2.4.x is buggy?
The other variable is I used to build them with Mandrake 7.2,
I've since upgraded to Mandrake 8.1. Perhaps the problem is the
version of gzip I use, or something else in the distribution.
Anyway, I hope to track this down today.
Very weird, and _very_ annoying. Wasted 4 hours on this Friday.
Torrey Hoffman
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Sun Dec 23 2001 - 21:00:13 EST