initrd problems??

initrd problems??

[till varoquaux]

I'm having problems netbooting a ultrasparc 1 server.
I'm using tilo (from silo1.4.6) with a home made initrd. In this initrd
I have a simple staticly linked busybox shell and a /linuxrc shell
script there are also a couple of devices under /dev. Now here is were
things start to get weird:
My initrd looks alright to me (at least it works find when I
mount it and chroot into it)
_If I use it without any changes I get the message you get when calling
busybox without any parametres ( /bin/busybox when the sha bang of my
/linuxrc is: #!/bin/sh)
_If I get rid of busybox put a statically linked bash in /bin and
replace the first line of /linuxrc with #!/bin/bash I get:
VFS: Mounted root (ext2 filesystem)
Kernel panic: No init found. Try passing init= option to your kernel

I'm confused: isn't the standard init for an initrd /linuxrc?
How do I pass options to the kernel with tilo?
How come busybox is called when there isn't even an init link??
My kernel is the one from the Debian boot cd (I don't have the time to
compile a new one until I get this problem solved).
Till Varoquaux
-- 
"pardon my french"

Re: initrd problems??

[Ben Collins]

> I'm confused: isn't the standard init for an initrd /linuxrc?
> How do I pass options to the kernel with tilo?
> How come busybox is called when there isn't even an init link??
> My kernel is the one from the Debian boot cd (I don't have the time to
> compile a new one until I get this problem solved).

Read Documentation/initrd.txt in the kernel sources. It gives a lot of
details about how initrd (and especially use of /linuxrc) is supposed to
work, and what the kernel expects.

You could just try doing init=/bin/bash and see if that works. (boot net
linux init=/bin/bash)

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Re: initrd problems??

[Ben Collins]

On Fri, Jul 02, 2004 at 02:58:50PM +0200, till varoquaux wrote:
> Thanks.
> I didn't knew how to pass parameters to the kernel. interesting...
> It does seem however like there is a weird bug:
> I recompiled busybox with init support
> (>init utilities
> 	>init
> 	>Support reading an initab file
> 	>Support running init from within an initrd
> 	>Should init be _extra_ quiet ion boot) 
> and moved my /linurxc to /etc/init.d/rcS
> and everything works fine now.....
> I'm using kernel 2.4.26. Should I fill a bug report?
> Regards,
> Till
> P.S.:I've build initrd on x86 before and definitly did not encounter
> this behavior.

I'm not quite sure why, but there is some weird difference in how
sparc64 boots up with initrd. I went down this road a long time ago with
the Debian boot images. I don't consider it a bug with the kernel, just
that x86 seems to be less critical of the initrd environment than other
architectures do. Hell, I can't even remember what it was that caused
this.

-- 
Debian     - http://www.debian.org/
Linux 1394 - http://www.linux1394.org/
Subversion - http://subversion.tigris.org/
WatchGuard - http://www.watchguard.com/

Re: initrd problems??

[till varoquaux]

Thanks.
I didn't knew how to pass parameters to the kernel. interesting...
It does seem however like there is a weird bug:
I recompiled busybox with init support
(>init utilities
	>init
	>Support reading an initab file
	>Support running init from within an initrd
	>Should init be _extra_ quiet ion boot) 
and moved my /linurxc to /etc/init.d/rcS
and everything works fine now.....
I'm using kernel 2.4.26. Should I fill a bug report?
Regards,
Till
P.S.:I've build initrd on x86 before and definitly did not encounter
this behavior.

On Fri, 2 Jul 2004 08:21:39 -0400
Ben Collins <bcollins@debian.org> wrote:

> > I'm confused: isn't the standard init for an initrd /linuxrc?
> > How do I pass options to the kernel with tilo?
> > How come busybox is called when there isn't even an init link??
> > My kernel is the one from the Debian boot cd (I don't have the time
to> > compile a new one until I get this problem solved).
> 
> Read Documentation/initrd.txt in the kernel sources. It gives a lot of
> details about how initrd (and especially use of /linuxrc) is supposed
to> work, and what the kernel expects.
> 
> You could just try doing init=/bin/bash and see if that works. (boot
net> linux init=/bin/bash)
> 
> -- 
> Debian     - http://www.debian.org/
> Linux 1394 - http://www.linux1394.org/
> Subversion - http://subversion.tigris.org/
> WatchGuard - http://www.watchguard.com/
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-- 
"pardon my french"

Re: initrd problems??

[till varoquaux]

Ok I think Ipretty much narrowed down the problem:
It seems the kernel executes /sbin/init instead of /linuxrc in the
initrd (at least for version 2.4.26). It also behaves very weirdly when
it cannot find /sbin/init.
Could anyone double check that for me.
Cheers,
Till