Bug#305977: additional information/caveats for the amd64 installer
A few things that came up during an install recently:
The p4-em64t-smp kernels can panic on contact with a megaraid controller.
One machine here worked fine, the other panicked every time.
You can get around this by choosing <go back> at some point and setting
the debconf question priority to "low", then you get to choose which
kernel to install (the amd64-generic one)
The new driver (called megaraid_mbox) in 2.6.11 seems to work fine.
Be careful when building an initrd kernel inside earlier kernels
(such as the 2.6.8-amd64-generic one) as the mkinitrd script will
think you need the megaraid module, which of course will no longer
exist.
You will probably have to override the module settings for the initrd
by:
a) setting ROOT= rather then ROOT=probe in /etc/mkinitrd/mkinitrd.conf
b) explicitly naming all the modules needed for root to be mounted in
/etc/mkinitrd/modules
If you are unsure which modules you need, you can check the ones currently
listed in the initrd as follows:
mkdir /tmp/initrdfs
mount -o loop -t cramfs /boot/initrd.img-`uname -r` /tmp/initrdfs
cat /tmp/initrdfs/loadmodules
umount /tmp/initrdfs
Remember to remove megaraid from the list and add megaraid_mbox instead!
Also, mine did not list ext3 as a requirement, but I added it anyway,
just in case.
The initrd is generated at kernel-image install time (you used make-kpkg,
right?) so you can check the modules your new kernel will think it needs
by the same process (only substitute the correct version string for
`uname -r`) after installing your new initrd kernel package.
In case you didn't know, the invocation you want is:
make-kpkg --initrd --append-to-version p4-em54t-smp-01 kernel_image
(for example: use an appropriate version string for your kernel)
Also noteworthy: xfs support is horribly horribly broken on 2.6.8 kernels
compiled for amd64-generic (at least: was not able to try the em64t
version, of course, as it panicked on boot)
The main symptom is lots of 'error 990' returns when accessing the fs.
Your best bet is to unmount any xfs partitions ASAP and not touch them
till you are safe and sound inside 2.6.11.
To sum up:
2.6.11 good
2.6.8 baaaad
Reply to: