Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 55540
initrd fails with devfs
Last modified: 2007-04-18 12:37:58 EDT
From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:0.9.5) Gecko/20011012 Description of problem: Initrd fails to mount real-root-dev when using devfs enabled kernel. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1.Compile devfs enabled kernel. 2.Create initrd image by mkinitrd, and run lilo with new initrd image. 3.Reboot. Actual Results: mkrootdev: mknod failed: 17 mount: cannot mount ext3.... Expected Results: mount real root filesystem. Additional info:
I think this is because nash doesn't play nicely with devfs. Mandrake have done some work on this, and I was able to get it to work by taking their latest Cooker version of the mkinitrd SRPM (mkinitrd-3.1.6-11_8.1mdk.src.rpm). This contains some patches for both nash and the /sbin/mkinitrd script which I applied to the Redhat SRPM (3.2.6-1). A devfs-enabled kernel set to mount /dev now boots very nicely. There is another slight problem - once you've got it started, the next thing you need to do is get it shutdown cleanly and /etc/init.d/halt keeps trying to unmount /dev. This causes the shutdown to hang since /dev doesn't like being unmounted. I'm running initscripts-6.40.2-1, and changed the following: line 29 - from: awk '!/(^#|proc|loopfs|autofs|^none|^\/dev\/root| \/ )/ {print $2}' /proc/mounts to: awk '!/(^#|devfs|proc|loopfs|autofs|^none|^\/dev\/root| \/ )/ {print $2}' /proc/mounts line 181 - from: umount -a -f to: umount -a -f -t nodevfs Perhaps RedHat would like to consider applying the Mandrake fixes for mkinitrd in their own distribution together with this minor fix to initscripts
*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 51848 ***