From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.01; Windows NT 5.0) I tried to upgrade the kernel of my box (Dell Precision 410, Dual Peintium- II 450MHz with AIC-7890 and AIC 7880 SCSI on-board adaptors) to 2.2.17- 14smp, but it gotkernel panic at boot time. The old kernel 2.2.16-3smp works just fine. Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. "rpm -i" the new kernel RPM file 2. mkinitrd for the new kernel 3. edit /etc/lilo.conf to add the new kernel 4. "lilo" 5. reboot Actual Results: . . . kmod: failed to exec /sbin/modprobe -s -k block-major-8, error=2 VFS: Cannot open root device 08:01 Kernel panic: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on 08:01 I've successfully upgraded other Linux boxes to 2.2.17-14smp.i686. They are 1. Dual Pentium II 300MHz with on-board AIC-7880 SCSI conctroller 2. Dual Pentium III 5000MHz with AHA=294X adapter it seems that the new kernel has some problem with AIC-7890,7880 controllers????
Doug, please investigate
Try passing '--with aic7xxx' (or --preload) option to mkinitrd.
When I tried "mkinitrd --with aic7xxx", it complaied "no /etc/conf.modules" something like that. Thus I "ln -s /etc/modules.conf /etc/conf.modules" and "mkinitrd" without "--with aic7xxx" option. And guess what? it works!!! I bet somehow the kernel or the mkinitrd command is confused about whether it's /etc/conf.modules or /etc/modules.conf ONLY WHEN the machine has TWO on- board SCSI controllers??? As I mentioned, the kernel and mkinitrd worked quite well on machines with only 1 SCSI controller and without /etc/conf.moduels.
Had you compiled your own kernel on the system with two controllers? If mkinitrd can't see the modules in 'lsmod', it'll try to add them, AFAIR. This is a thing to remember if you're creating mkinitrd on your own custom rescue disk. I've been bitten by it a lot of times :-)
No. For more than a year, I have been updating the box using only RPM files from RedHat. kernel-smp-2.2.17-14.i686.rpm is the first one that has this problem. For example, the previously released RPM files like kernel-smp-2.2.16- 3.i686.rpm have no such a problem and work just fine.
Obviously, this isn't a kernel bug. More likely it's a mkinitrd bug. For future reference, whenever making an initrd it is wise to use the -v flag so you can see what modules are actually being put into the initrd image. This habit has saved me a lot of grief in the past.
This appears to be a result of the 2.2.17-14 kernel changing /etc/conf.modules into /etc/modules.conf on 6.x boxes that don't have a modutils that is capable of handling /etc/modules.conf transparently. 6.0 I know falls into this category, maybe 6.1. We should probably put out something letting 6.x users know that they need to update modutils as that package is not in the updates directory for all 6.x versions.
probably, but it's a bit late for that now killing this due to old age... reopen if necessary