Re: Collapse ext2 and 3 please

Richard B. Johnson
2004-06-25T12:28:09Z

On Fri, 25 Jun 2004, David van Hoose wrote:

> yeah.. Really. Here's what I do.
>
> I have ext3 partitions, so I decided if they are different partitions,
> then I can compile my kernel with ext2 as a module and ext3 builtin.
> So I do it and reboot. Panic! Reason? Cannot find filesystem for the
> root partition.
> The error is in the kernel itself either way. Pick your reason.
> 1) ext3 is identified as ext2 on bootup.
> 2) There is no fallback to ext3 if ext2 is not found.
>
> I'll check this again to be sure on a 2.6 kernel later today, but as far
> as 2.4 is concerned my kernel panics.
>
> Regards,
> David
>
> PS. Shut up with the cheap insults. I have empirical evidence supporting
> my claim. Meaning there exists a bug somewhere.

If you make the root file-system, or any part of it, a module, then
the module must be loaded before the kernel attempts to mount the
root file-system. This is normally done using `initrd`. You need to
find out how to reconfigure `initrd` to handle your changes. This
varies between vendors and has nothing to do with the kernel. In
fact, when you see the message about being unable to mount the root
file-system, it means that the kernel was running fine but ran out
of things to do on startup because somebody, probably you, failed to
provide an available file-system to mount so it could continue the
startup by executing `init`.

Cheers,
Dick Johnson
Penguin : Linux version 2.4.26 on an i686 machine (5570.56 BogoMips).
Note 96.31% of all statistics are fiction.