Kernel 2.6 - At my wits end

Paul R. Ganci ganci at nurdog.com
Thu Mar 4 05:02:30 UTC 2004


I am writing this post from a system with an Asus K7V motherboard 
stuffed with an 850MHz Athlon processor, 512MB RAM and an Adaptec 2940UW 
SCSI card with three hard drives (Seagate ST15150N, Western Digital 
WDIGTL WDE4360-1807A3 and a Quantum XP34300W). This system has been 
running Fedora Core 1 for months now using a 2.4 kernel. Currently I have:

 > uname -a
Linux mcduff.nurdog 2.4.22-1.2174.nptl #2 Thu Feb 19 23:09:41 MST 2004 
i686 athlon i386 GNU/Linux

For better or for worse I had  wanted to make one large drive out of the 
three smaller drives using software RAID0 but because I could not 
install on a RAID0 partition I made a RAID1 /boot partition and a RAID0 
/ partition. The install worked perfectly with this setup and I have 
absolutely no problems booting with a 2.4 kernel.

Recently I tried to upgrade to a 2.6 kernel (kernel-2.6.1-1.65 from 
test). No matter what I do I get the following error at boot time:

mount: error 6 mounting ext3
pivotroot: pivot_root (/sysroot, /sysroot/initrd) failed: 2
umount /init/proc failed: 2
Freeing unused kernel ram
Kernel Panic: No init found.

According to the list archives and what I could find on the web via 
google (seaching for Kernel Panic No init) other people have experienced 
similar problems. Basically it appears that I can not find my / 
partition when I attempt to boot into a 2.6 kernel. Frankly I don't 
understand why this should be case since I can boot okay with the same 
setup into a 2.4 kernel. Typically I have found these types of problems 
usually involve an issue with the initial ramdisk and/or mkinitrd. There 
were several bugs I saw involving hardware RAID which while the symptoms 
were essentially identical the solutions didn't seem particular relevant 
to my problem. For example, in one case using LILO instead of GRUB fixed 
the problem. It appears that major and minor block numbers were not 
passed properly. LILO did the proper thing and GRUB did not.

Does anyone have an idea as to why I should be able to boot into a 2.4 
kernel with no problems but get a kernel panic when booting into 2.6 
kernel? I didn't do anything with mkinitrd. Is this possibly my problem? 
Do I need a new version perhaps?

Some pertinent information:

root at mcduff> cat grub.conf
# grub.conf generated by anaconda
#
# Note that you do not have to rerun grub after making changes to this file
# NOTICE:  You have a /boot partition.  This means that
#          all kernel and initrd paths are relative to /boot/, eg.
#          root (hd0,0)
#          kernel /vmlinuz-version ro root=/dev/md1
#          initrd /initrd-version.img
#boot=/dev/sda
default=1
timeout=10
splashimage=(hd0,0)/grub/splash.xpm.gz
title Fedora Core (2.6.1-1.65)
        root (hd0,0)
        kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.1-1.65 ro root=/dev/md1
        initrd /initrd-2.6.1-1.65.img
title Fedora Core (2.4.22-1.2174.nptl)
        root (hd0,0)
        kernel /vmlinuz-2.4.22-1.2174.nptl ro root=/dev/md1
        initrd /initrd-2.4.22-1.2174.nptl.img
title Fedora Core (2.4.22-1.2166.nptl)
        root (hd0,0)
        kernel /vmlinuz-2.4.22-1.2166.nptl ro root=/dev/md1
        initrd /initrd-2.4.22-1.2166.nptl.img

root at mcduff> cat raidtab
raiddev             /dev/md1
raid-level                  0
nr-raid-disks               3
chunk-size                  64
persistent-superblock       1
nr-spare-disks              0
    device          /dev/sda3
    raid-disk     0
    device          /dev/sdb3
    raid-disk     1
    device          /dev/sdc2
    raid-disk     2
raiddev             /dev/md0
raid-level                  1
nr-raid-disks               2
chunk-size                  64
persistent-superblock       1
nr-spare-disks              0
    device          /dev/sda1
    raid-disk     0
    device          /dev/sdb1
    raid-disk     1

root at mcduff> cat fstab
/dev/md1                /                       ext3    defaults        1 1
/dev/md0                /boot                   ext3    defaults        1 2
nureyevtoo:/home        /mnt/nureyevtoo         nfs     defaults        0 0
nureyev:/home           /mnt/home               nfs     defaults        0 0
none                    /dev/pts                devpts  gid=5,mode=620  0 0
none                    /proc                   proc    defaults        0 0
none                    /dev/shm                tmpfs   defaults        0 0
/dev/sdc1               swap                    swap    defaults        0 0
/dev/sdb2               swap                    swap    defaults        0 0
/dev/sda2               swap                    swap    defaults        0 0
/dev/cdrom              /mnt/cdrom              udf,iso9660 
noauto,owner,kudzu,ro 0 0
/dev/cdrom1             /mnt/cdrom1             udf,iso9660 
noauto,owner,kudzu,ro 0 0
/dev/fd0                /mnt/floppy             auto    
noauto,owner,kudzu 0 0

root at mcduff> dir /
bin   dev  home    lib         misc  opt   root  tmp  var
boot  etc  initrd  lost+found  mnt   proc  sbin  usr

As I said I am at my wits end. I can boot into either of the 2.4 kernels 
but not the 2.6 kernel. I obviously have something basic screwed up but 
I'll be darned if I can find it.

Thanks for any ideas.

-- 
Paul (ganci at nurdog.com)





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