A couple of rawhide surprises

Bill Nottingham notting at redhat.com
Mon Feb 13 20:54:50 UTC 2006


Jonathan Corbet (lwn-fedora-test at lwn.net) said: 
> I did the massive update on my x86-64 rawhide box today.  The resulting
> system would not boot.  It seems that the update changes rc.sysinit,
> taking out the lines which mount /proc and /sys.  It's amazing how badly
> the system does without those filesystems...it can't even get into
> single-user mode.  Let's hear it for rescue disks.
> 
> Putting the mount lines back into rc.sysinit makes things work again,
> but I assume this change was made for a reason?  Is there somthing in
> the Fedora kernel now which mounts those filesystems automatically?  If
> so, people (like me) running mainline kernels will get a surprise.

This was done as the initrd already mounts them. See bug 181002.

Right now, if you're not using an initrd, you already have to:

1) make sure your storage driver is built in (might be, in our stock kernels)
2) make sure your root fs type is built in (requires your own kernel)
3) make sure you have some sort of prefilled /dev created (requires your own /dev
   or udev)
... probably some other things I'm forgetting

And lets not get into drivers that require firmware or other ugliness.

So, generally, we require an initrd. I suppose I could put the lines
in for now and relnote that booting without an initrd is deprecated, and
support may be explicitly removed post-FC5.

Bill




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