Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 54973
Kernel panic relating to initrd
Last modified: 2007-04-18 12:37:43 EDT
From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:0.9.5+) Gecko/20011018 Description of problem: If /initrd is deleted the computer will not finish booting up after a reboot. It will kernel panic with a message about setting init= Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. rm /initrd 2. Reboot 3. See error message Actual Results: I saw the error message Expected Results: To see the error message Additional info: This is using kernel-2.4.7-10
Don't do that, then. It's required.
The problem is that, as outlined in bug 54878, this situation can arise if RHN updates are incompletely applied. It would be appropriate to tolerate this situation by creating /initrd if necessary, perhaps on each mkinitrd run, or at least during mkinitrd rpm installation.
That's what the RPM requirement is for. I don't mean to be abrubt, but if you break your dependencies, or remove random directories, you shouldn't be surprised if something breaks.
I wouldn't have broken the dependencies if another way around odd RPM packaging was eminently available. In any case, this particular situation is not hard to correct. Hell, it's dead easy to detect: make mkinitrd assert the existence of this directory, much like it would abort if would fail to find some modules from modules.conf.