[Libguestfs] building a supermin appliance with febootstrap...

[Hilko Bengen]

* Kashyap Chamarthy:

> So, I tried to build the simple supermin app. from your blog. I can
> confirm that I did get to the shell when I invoked qemu-kvm.
>
> I used the standard qemu-kvm cmdline (but appended a serial console). This boots fine.
> [...]
>
> But when I try to 'exit', I notice a kernel panic. And it just seems
> to hung there, no more budging. I had to do 'ctl a + x' to get out of
> the serial console.
> Is this expected?

This is normal behavior. The demo system as described by Rich has no
regular init process. The shell has been started via exec, so it is PID
1. PID 1 has a special role on Unix and Linux, the first processs that
is started by the kernel is normally /sbin/init which is responsible for
bringing up the rest of the system. Something must have gone horribly
wrong with the system if this process exits.

And this is what the kernel panic message you posted is all about:

> bash-4.2# exit
> exit
> [  153.520309] Kernel panic - not syncing: Attempted to kill init!
> [  153.523584] Pid: 1, comm: init Not tainted 2.6.40-4.fc15.x86_64 #1

-Hilko