Re: 2.6.22-git17 boot failure

Tilman Schmidt wrote:
Jeremy Fitzhardinge schrieb:

Well, it looks to me like it all falls over once it hits usermode;
everything up till then is identical (except for the Xen-related
initcalls which naturally don't exist in the non-Xen case).


Just a wild thought: could the actual problem be with accessing the
initrd? After all, everything that's failing is based on modules
which are stuffed there. But I know far too less about initrd to
pursue this thought further.


Well, the kernel is managing to mount the initrd as a filesystem, and
the "waiting for root to appear" message looks like its coming from
usermode as well. So I suspect its something to do with module loading,
but I can't imagine what at the moment.

Statically compiling the scsi/ahci/etc drivers will help make some
progress in debugging this.

I really can't see how its directly Xen related. It looks like either:

1. some bug which only appears with particular kernel memory layouts,
and enabling Xen happens to make it bad
2. or some kind of linker bug, possibly triggered by Xen's ELF notes
(but I'd really expect this to break in a more basic way)
3. ...?


I'm at a loss. I don't know if there's some way to debug the initrd in
more detail. I suspect that its failing all PCI probing, rather being a
specific SCSI/AHCI problem (since none of the other messages appear either).

Does the Xen case just hang, or reboot, or what? The kernel messages
just appear to stop. I'd expect it to at least complain about not
mounting the root filesystem or something.


Yes, of course. Sorry, I thought I'd mentioned that. It shows the
standard behaviour of a Suse that cannot mount its root filesystem:
first a message: "waiting for /dev/system/root to appear" followed
by a series of dots, and then fallback into a standalone /bin/sh.


Oh, you get a shell? What does /proc/pci have in it? What happens if
you manually try to modprobe something? That gives us much more to work
with.

J
-
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/

Relevant Pages

  • Re: fsck fails during boot with 2.6.9-34.0.1.EL kernel because root filesystem is already rw mou
    ... I think there was a little fault in building the new initrd. ... The mount-command of the init-script is wrong and makes confusing, e.g.: first the root-filesystem must mount read/write, it accepts. ... It looks like in the early stage of the booting, when the kernel is using the initrd to load the ... I still do not understand why in my new initrd file, with the new kernel, the root filesystem is ...
    (RedHat)
  • Re: Debian Unstable wont boot on 2.6.15-1/grub/raid1
    ... If I boot up on 2.6.16-1 the system will ... udev is not involved until after the root filesystem is mounted. ... problem is in the initrd, which prepares the system to mount root. ... The 2.6.15 kernel package on backports.org, at least, wants to use yaird ...
    (Debian-User)
  • Re: Boot after kernel recompile
    ... > The Fedora kernels have an initrd, a RAM disk that gets mounted as a ... > specifying the real root filesystem is done with userspace tools. ... > Without an initrd, the kernel mounts the root filesystem itself. ... they need to be custom-made for the kernel you're ...
    (Fedora)
  • Re: 1st kernel compile help
    ... Just means the kernel image won't fit on a 1.44M floppy. ... > 2) The book says that I don't need and initrd image if I don't have a SCSI ... driver and/or filesystem handler for your root filesystem are ... now that I've got this bzImage. ...
    (linux.redhat)
  • Re: booting from ISO image on HD?
    ... >> through customized initrd files for each one. ... > between the loopback device and the underlying file (the iso image). ... I have to insmod the loop kernel module(e.g. ... how can you boot it from an initrd??? ...
    (comp.os.linux.misc)