Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 82377
mount can't do tmpfs during installer
Last modified: 2008-05-01 11:38:04 EDT
From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.2.1) Gecko/20021218 Description of problem: Even though /proc/filesystems says tmpfs is available in the installer kernel, /usr/bin/mount -> busybox has failed in all my attempts to mount a tmpfs filesystem. I tried leaving the device out, putting it in as the directory on which I wanted to mount, naming /dev/zero, /dev/null, creating entries in /etc/fstab, specifying the size or leaving it out, all to no avail. It always failed with `Invalid argument'. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): phoebe2 How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1.Boot the installer and get to stage2 2.mkdir /mnt/newtmp 3.mount -t tmpfs {,-o size=8m} {,/mnt/newtmp,/dev/zero,/dev/null} /mnt/newtmp Actual Results: mount fails with an error ending with `: Invalid argument' Expected Results: at least one of the above should work Additional info: using /dev/ram serves as a work around for now (bug 80209)
I tried this against the latest busybox and it worked fine sudo ./mount -t tmpfs -o size=8m /mnt/zero /mnt/newtmp ls -l mount lrwxrwxrwx 1 dwalsh dwalsh 13 Jan 24 12:16 mount -> /sbin/busybox busybox-0.60.5-2
It is true that busybox 0.60.5-5 (as in a full install of phoebe 2) can mount tmpfs. The problem occurs in the installer environment, though, with a command line identical to that which works in the installed system (same as what you use, except for s,mnt/zero,dev/zero,. I've verified that /dev/zero exists, so that's not it. Perhaps we have an old version of busybox in the installer image? Or maybe there's something wrong with the kernel? Anyway, I'm changing this to anaconda since the problem doesn't seem to be in busybox, but rather in the installer environment (even if it's just that the busybox build in the installer has to be updated).
I'm pretty sure tmpfs isn't in the BOOT kernel for space reasons.
How did you check that tmpfs isn't supported in the BOOT kernel? cat /proc/filesystems says it is there so, if it is not supposed to be, we can probably reduce the kernel some more, or put in whatever little bits are missing for tmpfs to work correctly, which would help solving bug 80203.
I looked in the kernel config :) from config-i386-BOOT # CONFIG_TMPFS is not set