Bug#293481: kernel-image-2.6.8-2-686: Cannot open root device

[Nigel Stephens <nigel@mips.com>]

Thiemo Seufer wrote:

> Nigel Stephens wrote:
> [snip]
>  
>
> > So what could be preventing the new kernel from even running the linuxrc 
> > script, or at the very least preventing it from showing the output from 
> > the extra "echo" line which I added to it.
> >    
>
> This might point to a missing or invalid /dev/console. (At least with
> udev-managed devices that's not a completely unlikely theory.)
>
>  

I was a bit worried about this message when I diffed my initrd-2.6.6 and 
initrd.2.6.8

 File initrd-2.6.6/dev/console is a character special file while file 
initrd-2.6.8/dev/console is a character special file

Looking in detail I see:

 shoreditch.root /tmp 2# ls -l initrd-2.6.6/dev/console
 crw-rw----  1 root root 5, 1 Jan  1  1970 initrd-2.6.6/dev/console
 shoreditch.root /tmp 2# ls -l initrd-2.6.8/dev/console
 crw-------  1 root tty 5, 1 Jan  1  1970 initrd-2.6.8/dev/console

So the permissions are different, but I can't imagine that would make 
any difference at this stage of the bootstrap, which must surely be 
running with a uid of root.

Of course udev may be overwriting this and screwing it up, since I think 
that 2.6.6 didn't have udev, while 2.6.8 does - is that right? Is there 
anything that I could add to the boot command line to control udev, or 
to help diagnose the problem?

Nigel