Re: Kernel Panic After Build, RH Linux 9 (Shrike)

On Thu, 16 Feb 2006 00:37:08 +0000, W. Watson wrote:

General Schvantzkoph wrote:

On Wed, 15 Feb 2006 23:08:05 +0000, W. Watson wrote:


General Schvantzkoph wrote:

On Wed, 15 Feb 2006 21:25:57 +0000, W. Watson wrote:



I tried building realtime linux kernel on an older IBM PC (500MHz) with RH
Linux 9. Got Linux on OK, and seemingly rtlinux; however, when I went to
boot rtlinux, it died in the boot process with:

ext2-FS ide0(3,2) couldn't mount because of unsupported optimal features (4).
Kernel panic VFS: Unable to mount root fs on 03:02.

What's this all about?

A couple of possibilities. I specified ext3 (menuconfig). I may
have never done that in any other installations. In another step("make
modules modules_install"), "-depmod -a" failed. The latter generally gets me
into trouble when I do this install. I replaced it with "/sbin/depmod -a"
and re-entered the make. It seemed happy with that.

Wayne T. Watson (Watson Adventures, Prop., Nevada City, CA)
(121.015 Deg. W, 39.262 Deg. N) GMT-8 hr std. time)
Obz Site: 39° 15' 7" N, 121° 2' 32" W, 2700 feet

Wayne T. Watson (Watson Adventures, Prop., Nevada City, CA)
(121.015 Deg. W, 39.262 Deg. N) GMT-8 hr std. time)
Obz Site: 39° 15' 7" N, 121° 2' 32" W, 2700 feet


Which kernel did you try and build? Which version of GCC? RH9 is very old
and it uses an obsolete version of GCC. I'm pretty sure that the recent
Linux kernels require a current version of GCC (if I'm wrong about this
someone on this newsgroup is sure to let us know). Finally how much RAM to
you have on that box? I have an old laptop that only has 384M in it. I get
that same depmod failed error on the laptop when I try to build a kernel
on it. I'm using FC4 and I've had zero problems building kernels on any of
my other boxes, all of which have at least a gigabyte of RAM. I never had
any problem building a kernel on the laptop when it had 512M of RAM (one
256M DIMM failed so I replaced it with a 128M DIMM that I had laying
around which is why it's down to 384), which is why I suspect that it's a
memory problem.


128MB memory!!
P3 processor
13G HD
5122KB Cache
Linux 2.4.20-6
GCC 3.2.2-5
You may be right about the memory. That might be a bit too low, although
plain Linux holds together.


Wayne T. Watson (Watson Adventures, Prop., Nevada City, CA)
(121.015 Deg. W, 39.262 Deg. N) GMT-8 hr std. time)
Obz Site: 39° 15' 7" N, 121° 2' 32" W, 2700 feet


MY old laptop runs FC4 with Gnome fine, the only thing that doesn't
work is building a kernel. I'm not absolutely convinced of my memory
theory, I get the same error even when I'm running the machine without X
windows. It could be a PIII issue, all of my current machines are A64s.
It's hard to believe that the kernel build has a dependence on the
processor being > PIII but it sure seems that way.

Well, I've been snookered by this before. I personally have a 1.5GHz machine
that I tried installing earlier versions of RH Linux on, 6.3, 7, whatever,
and they all failed. However, 9 went on fine, and I was able to put rtlinux
on it. Here's the so-called base installation for rtlinux with RHL 9:
1.1 Installation of Red Hat Linux 9.0
=====================================
* CD-Check
* Language Selection
English (English)
* Keyboard
German (latin w/ no deadkeys)
* Mouse Configuration
2 Button Mouse (PS/2)
* Upgrade Examine
Perform a new Red Hat Linux installation
* Installation Type
Workstation
* Disk Partitioning Setup
Automatically partition
* Automatic Partitioning
Remove all partitions on this system
* Boot Loader Configuration
Use LILO as the boot loader
* Network Configuration
- Edit Interface eth0
no DHCP
Active on boot
IP 192.168.0.11
NM 255.255.255.0
- Hostname RTL02
- GW 192.168.0.1
* Firewall Configuration
No firewall
* Additional Language Support
English (USA)
* Time Zone Selection
- Location
Europe/Vienna
System clock uses UTC
- UTC Offset
UTC
* Set Root Password
* Workstation Defaults
Accept the current package list
* About to Install
* ...
* Boot Diskette Creation
Yes
* Graphical Interface (X) Configuration
Skip X configuration
* Reboot


Wayne T. Watson (Watson Adventures, Prop., Nevada City, CA)
(121.015 Deg. W, 39.262 Deg. N) GMT-8 hr std. time)
Obz Site: 39° 15' 7" N, 121° 2' 32" W, 2700 feet

Why are you using an obsolete distribution? RH9 hasn't been supported for
years. Install Fedora Core 4 or CentOS 4. It might not solve the kernel
install problem but that's a lot less important because you'll have a
recent kernel. In the case of Fedora they always have the current kernel,
which is 2.6.15.x at the moment. CentOS is a clone of Redhat Enterprise
Linux so the kernel version is a patched version of an older kernel, I
think it's 2.6.11.x but it might be a .12. In both cases the kernel is
four years newer then what's in RH9.


.

Relevant Pages