Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 171370
Can't boot Kernel without modules support without initrd
Last modified: 2007-11-30 17:07:21 EST
From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; fr-FR; rv:1.7.8) Gecko/20050511 Firefox/1.0.4 Description of problem: I usually always use my own vanilla Kernel compiled without modules support. With RHEL 4 update 1. It doesn't boot without initrd. But initrd is used only with Kernel compiled with modules support. There are 2 problems : 1/ Without using initrd, Kernel 2.6.13 boot fails because it can't open a console. The reason is that /dev/console (and others like /dev/tty, ...) doesn't exist. /dev is empty and is populated by udev later in the boot process. But the boot process is stopped before reaching udev. The solution is to boot with RHEL rescue CD and to copy /dev/* to /mnt/sysimage/dev. Now it's possible to boot my static Kernel without using a useless initrd 2/ If I'm trying to use the initrd files provided with RHEL (initrd-2.6-9-11.ELsmp.img yes my box has 2 CPUs) the boot fails because it can't insmod SCSI modules. If I delete the modules in the /lib directory of the img file and I remove the insmod in the init file the boot fails again because it can't mount root filesystem (mount error 6). Of course my Kernel is compiled with everything needed (ex2fs, initrd support, ...) and works fine without initrd (see 1/) and with my own initrd but not with the one provided with RHEL. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. Boot with a kernel compiled without modules support and without initrd 2. 3. Additional info:
so you're trying to boot 2.6.13 with the rhel4 initrd and you want that to work? If that's then i'd suggest simply not using it.
No as I explained I want to boot with a static kernel 2.6.13 compiled by myself. But it fails if I don't tell it to use an initrd file. But initrd file is useless for a staticly compiled kernel.