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This problem is new to the 2.2.x kernel When your root disk is a scsi unit you load in inital ramdisk so you can load the required scsi driver before mounting the real root file systems. In the new kernel the scsi module (aha1542 at least, probably other drivers too) starts a kernel process named scsi_eh_0 which on my system gets PID number 8. This process inherits the open files from the insmod program which has as current direcotry the ram disk file system, has the file for the driver open and the console device. When the kernel process inherits these open files, these file will never be closed, so when the kernel later tries to unmount the ram disk file system it will fail because of these open files, and because the file system can't be unmounted the ram area used by this ram disk file system cannot be freed. For a normal ram disk image this is about one and a half megabyts of ram waisted. The kernel thread si started on the procedure scsi_error_handler() found in /usr/src/linux/drivers/scsi/scsi_error.c This routine has some nice comments about the user space pages inherited from the insmod process. The inherited open files will lock an even bigger number of pages in kernel, in this case protected file system pages. Villy
Thank you. I've been trying to figure out the cause of assorted Linux 2.2 initrd reports and you've given me the info I'd missed. Alan
This should be fixed in 2.2.12 and later. Alan, do you disagree?
Assigned to dledford
The problem is unchanged present in Redhat linux version 6.2 kernel 2.2.14-5.0 BTW, what does it mean "Stauts: RESOLVED CURRENTRELEASE"? -- Villy
It was sorted for most cases. The remaining one I think I finally nailed in 2.2.17pre12