Description of problem: I got the following while booting kernel-2.6.9-1.639 on x86_64 ..... Probing IDE interface ide0... request_module: runaway loop modprobe net-pf-1 request_module: runaway loop modprobe net-pf-1 request_module: runaway loop modprobe net-pf-1 request_module: runaway loop modprobe net-pf-1 request_module: runaway loop modprobe net-pf-1 Probing IDE interface ide1... ..... Eventually the whole thing boots so this is easy to miss if one is not checking for it. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): mkinitrd-4.1.18-1 How reproducible: Not clear. Yesterday looked quite reproducible to me. Now I cannot reproduce using either 2.6.9-1.639 or 2.6.9-1.640 kernels. Originally I thought that this may be related to segfaults in udev but Harald asked me to refile under mkinitrd. I do not have yet fixed udev while attempting to reproduce and all initrd images where this showed up, or not, were done with mkinitrd-4.1.18-1.
net-pf-1 is unix domain sockets. Considering that that pretty much *has* to be built into the kernel, that's a very odd message. Assigning to kernel; that message is coming before mkinitrd.
indeed, and CONFIG_UNIX=y in current kernels (and has been since ever afaik). this smells like a userspace bug to me.
This was apparently a "bad day" when I noticed that "runaway loop". I had no troubles to get that then and I could not reproduce this ever after. It is possible that with quick pace of updates something was changed which made it to disappear.