Initial ramdisks produced with recent mkinitrds will not boot devfs enabled kernels properly. The latest version I tried this on is 3.1.6-1. Steps to Reproduce: 1. Compile kernel with devfs enabled 2. mkinitrd 3. reboot I'll attach a patch containing two changes: - nash/mkrootdev() now renames /dev/root (which is already there in devfs) prior to making the root device. Perhaps not mkrootdev()ing at all is a better way. - mkinitrd now accepts the --devfs switch which will mount the devfs to /dev after pivot_root()ing.
Created attachment 28015 [details] Patch allowing initrds to work with devfs kernels
Umm forgot something: Of course, nash/mkrootdev only renames /dev/root if /dev is a devfs (checks for existence of /dev/.devfsd).
Could you grab the latest mkinitrd out of CVS and update your patches. Email me the final patches and I'll integrate them asap. I've marked a couple of bugs duplicates of this one; they have patches that may or may not help.
*** Bug 62719 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
*** Bug 55540 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
I guess you don't want to fix this... As devfs has race conditions, etc according to everyone I've talked to I'm not going to worry.