kernel panic after recompile

[C. Linus Hicks]

On Thu, 2005-02-10 at 15:47 +1300, Geoff Rainey (DSL AK) wrote:
> See my previous message. It looks like you are having the same issue I had with the MPT Fusion
> SCSI device driver. I take it you got this information from the currently operational kernel during
> boot time right?
> Anyway, re-run the kernel recompile process and during the driver selection, go to
> SCSI devices, there is a section for MPT support, select that either as a module or
> include in the kernel - I would suggest including it in the kernel since it is a core 
> necessary driver, this being the case, I don't think you will need to worry about a new
> init ram disk image. That should solve your problem.

I have not seen mention of Red Hat version Bill is using, but I would
like to point out some things I have found with the RHEL4 beta. I used
to build kernels for Red Hat systems without ever using an initrd, just
including those modules necessary for getting the root filesystem up as
compiled-in to the kernel. Note that RHEL4 uses udev which makes things
very different, and Fedora Core 3 does also. I'm not sure when the
switch was made in Fedora, or maybe it started out that way.

Anyway, if you try to boot a kernel that includes everything needed to
mount the root filesystem, the behavior seems to be the same, whether or
not there is an initrd, so instead of running init from the initrd, it
runs the real /sbin/init. The problem with this, since the system is
using udev, there isn't anything in /dev, and the kernel panics trying
to open the console.

I have customized my rc.sysinit to account for this situation, and it
seems to be running properly, but I thought I'd share what I found and
warn others about it.

About Bill's problem, he answered affirmative to running mkinitrd, AND
he mentioned that he is doing mirroring (though he didn't say whether
hardware or software). The manpage for mkinitrd says it will include
"raid modules if the system's root partition is on raid" so shouldn't he
be set as long as he has the proper alias for scsi_hostadapter in his
modprobe.conf? The thing is, we don't actually know what error he is
getting, so it could be anything.

Bill, what error are you getting?

-- 
C. Linus Hicks <lhicks at nc dot rr dot com>