[fedora-arm] Kernel failing to boot at guruplug

[Andy Green]

On 07/22/10 17:09, Somebody in the thread at some point said:
>         freeing kernel memory. Maybe init fails? The bash I get from
>         init=/bin/bash only spits a error at when trying to init/telinit
>         by hand.
>
>         Any ideas? Anybody flashed a custom kernel and got init working?
>
>
>     On my F12 setup the default init does work fine, just makes the boot
>     four times slower than my custom init and scripts.
>
>
> if possible, can you post your custom script?

I have a custom init executable (actually to save boot time my main GUI 
executable serves as init) which later spawns the scripts, unfortunately 
that doesn't have a Free license.

>     Why don't you hack some
>
>     echo "hello" > /dev/ttyxyz0

> It reaches not even line #2, line #1 is #!/bin/bash

Just in case I should explain ttyxyz0 was just a placeholder for 
whatever your serial console device is.  In my case, ttymxc0 for imx31 SoC.

If that was obvious then I guess init is choking somewhere, possibly it 
lacks some pieces in /dev?


Anyway you can just hack up a script as your init, something along these 
lines:

#!/bin/bash
#
#
PATH=/bin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/usr/sbin

mount -n -t proc /proc /proc
mount -n -t sysfs /sys /sys
mount -n -t devpts devpts /dev/pts

rsyslogd &
echo "fsck on ro rootfs"
time fsck -y /dev/mmcblk0p1
if [ $? -gt 2 ] ; then
  echo "Attempting reboot on fsck error"
  reboot
fi

echo "remounting rootfs rw"
mount -n -o remount,rw /
echo "mounting other filesystems"
mount -a
echo "mount done"

ifconfig lo 127.0.0.1 &
hostname xyz

# kill temp database
rm -f /var/lib/rpm/__*

/bin/bash

echo "rc.sysinit done"

while [ 1 ] ; do sleep 5s ; done


(It's a good idea to start the rootfs from the kernel with "ro" so you 
can fsck it before anything from the current boot session has its hooks 
into it).

There's a huge value in Fedora basis for arm rootfs without running 
stock init.  Even without /sbin/init as pid 1, all of the 
/etc/init.d/blah start / stop / restart stuff works fine.  You just need 
to start them in your startup script explicitly (and with ... & usually 
since you don't want to delay boot flow while sshd starts for example).

I guess you already experienced how fast it is coming to /bin/bash 
prompt if that is init, there's no reason it should be much slower than 
that.

-Andy