Bug 55540

Summary: initrd fails with devfs
Product: [Retired] Red Hat Linux Reporter: Marek Greško <gresko>
Component: mkinitrdAssignee: Matt Wilson <msw>
Status: CLOSED DUPLICATE QA Contact: David Lawrence <dkl>
Severity: medium Docs Contact:
Priority: medium    
Version: 7.2CC: tim_clymo
Target Milestone: ---   
Target Release: ---   
Hardware: i386   
OS: Linux   
Whiteboard:
Fixed In Version: Doc Type: Bug Fix
Doc Text:
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Clone Of: Environment:
Last Closed: 2001-11-18 20:55:14 UTC Type: ---
Regression: --- Mount Type: ---
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Verified Versions: Category: ---
oVirt Team: --- RHEL 7.3 requirements from Atomic Host:
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Description Marek Greško 2001-11-01 19:34:28 UTC
From Bugzilla Helper:
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Description of problem:
Initrd fails to mount real-root-dev when using devfs enabled kernel.

Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable):


How reproducible:
Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1.Compile devfs enabled kernel.
2.Create initrd image by mkinitrd, and run lilo with new initrd image.
3.Reboot.
	

Actual Results:  
mkrootdev: mknod failed: 17
mount: cannot mount ext3....

Expected Results:  mount real root filesystem.

Additional info:

Comment 1 Tim Clymo 2001-11-18 20:55:08 UTC
I think this is because nash doesn't play nicely with devfs. Mandrake have done
some work on this, and I was able to get it to work by taking their latest
Cooker version of the mkinitrd SRPM (mkinitrd-3.1.6-11_8.1mdk.src.rpm). This
contains some patches for both nash and the /sbin/mkinitrd script which I
applied to the Redhat SRPM (3.2.6-1). A devfs-enabled kernel set to mount /dev
now boots very nicely.

There is another slight problem - once you've got it started, the next thing you
need to do is get it shutdown cleanly and /etc/init.d/halt keeps trying to
unmount /dev. This causes the shutdown to hang since /dev doesn't like being
unmounted. I'm running initscripts-6.40.2-1, and changed the following:
line 29 - 
from: awk '!/(^#|proc|loopfs|autofs|^none|^\/dev\/root| \/ )/ {print $2}'
/proc/mounts
to: awk '!/(^#|devfs|proc|loopfs|autofs|^none|^\/dev\/root| \/ )/ {print $2}'
/proc/mounts
line 181 -
from: umount -a -f
to: umount -a -f -t nodevfs

Perhaps RedHat would like to consider applying the Mandrake fixes for mkinitrd
in their own distribution together with this minor fix to initscripts

Comment 2 Erik Troan 2002-05-21 23:15:45 UTC

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 51848 ***