[Fedora-xen] Re: Centos Hangs before login prompt, and udev fails.

[Paul Wouters]

On Fri, 2 Feb 2007, K T Ligesh wrote:

>  Allright, I think I got the issue. I am trying to boot a centos 4.1 on a fc6. Now fc6 initrd, even the custom created one, has nash-hotplugd, which has to be killed before starting udev, but this logic is not there in the initscripts of centos-4.1. So I have to basically hand craft an initrd that will kill off this nash-hotplug in the initrd itself, if it has to work with all the older distros.

I don't think that is the reason for not getting a login prompt. The nash-hotplug can be annoying. I've had to kill
it in the past too. I infact disable hotplay/udev on those older images, and just use a MAKEDEV and create the
devices I need,

To fix your login problem do this:

mount -o loop centosfs dir
cd dir

(or login via ssh to the running centos box)

cd dev ; /dev/MAKEDEV null zero random urandom console tty pty hda xvd loop
(this uses the MAKEDEV script in the /dev/ of dom0 to create nodes in the
 /dev of the guest image)

mknod dev/xvc0 c 25 187
(cause there is some confusion about which major/minor to use)

edit inittab and change the mingetty for tty2 to xvc0, eg:

	2:2345:respawn:/sbin/mingetty xvc0

(change tty2 not tty1 because in a normal "working" situation, tty1 will be mapped
 to the xen virtual console already, you do not want to break that)

And do:

echo "xvc0" >> etc/securetty
(to allow root logins)

I also made a xenU ramdisk for my images, on dom0:

mkinitrd /boot/initrd-2.6.18-1.2849.fc6xenU.img --with=xennet --preload=xenblk

(again note to redhat: PLEASE include xennet/xenblk in the xen ramdisk, even if
 the dom0 strictly does not need it. It will allow everyone to re-use the same
  initrd when not using pygrub with disk images, but kernel=/ramdisk= statements
 with a rootfs)

Paul