Re: booting without initrd

[Joe Korty <joe.korty@ccur.com>]

On Thu, Jun 08, 2006 at 06:43:25PM -0700, Paul Dickson wrote:
> On Fri, 09 Jun 2006 02:40:59 +0200, Arjan van de Ven wrote:
> > On Thu, 2006-06-08 at 13:40 -0400, Rahul Karnik wrote:
> > > On 6/7/06, Ram Gupta <ram.gupta5@gmail.com> wrote:
> > > > I am trying to boot with 2.6.16  kernel at my desktop running fedora
> > > > core 4 . It does not boot without initrd generating the message "VFS:
> > > > can not open device "804" or unknown-block(8,4)
> > > > Please append a correct "root=" boot option
> > > > Kernel panic - not syncing : VFS:Unable to mount root fs on unknown-block(8,4)
> > > 
> > > AFAIK Fedora sets up the kernel command line with "root=LABEL=/" in
> > > grub.conf and therefore needs the initrd in order to work correctly.
> > > If you do not want an initrd, then change this to
> > > "root=/dev/<your_disk>" in grub.conf. 
> > 
> > it's more than that; also udev is used from the initrd to populate a
> > ramfs /dev, if you go without the initrd you need to populate the
> > *real* /dev manually first

When I do the following to FC5, I am able to boot kernel.org kernels w/o
an initrd:

        # mount --bind / /mnt
	# cd /mnt/dev
	# mknod null c 1 3
	# mknod console c 5 1
	# for i in $(seq 0 9); do mknod tty$i c 4 $i; done
	# cd /
	# umount /mnt

IMHO, FC5's failure to set up a minimal disk-based /dev like this
is a bug on its part.

Regards,
Joe