Bug#499575: linux-image-2.6-K7 Wait for root file system after upgrading from kernel 2.6.22 to 2.6-K7

["J.L.H.W. Linkels" <jlinkels@rnw.an>]

Package: linux-image-2.6-K7
Version: 2.6.26+16
Severity: grave
Justification: renders package unusable



-- System Information:
Debian Release: lenny/sid
  APT prefers testing
  APT policy: (500, 'testing')
Architecture: i386 (i686)

Kernel: Linux 2.6.22-3-k7 (SMP w/1 CPU core)
Locale: LANG=en_US, LC_CTYPE=en_US (charmap=ISO-8859-1)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/bash

Versions of packages linux-image-2.6-K7 depends on:
ii  linux-image-2.6-686           2.6.26+16  Linux 2.6 image on 
PPro/Celeron/PI

linux-image-2.6-K7 recommends no packages.

linux-image-2.6-K7 suggests no packages.

-- no debconf information

I know this is a bug often seen before, but there are a few things
different. I know about the problem that newer kernels consider hda => sda
etc. But I thought it was well before 2.6.22 that it happened.

I had a system running Etch with kernel 2.6.18. As a prelude to dist-upgrade
to Lenny I installed 2.6.22. This was not satisfactory as
kernel-headers-2.6-k7 is not installable.

When I upgraded from 2.6.22 to 2.6.26. The machine would
hang at "Waiting for root file system"

Then I replaced occurences to hdc1 with LABEL entries. This is the state of
the boot stanza in menu.lst and the relevant mount line in fstab:

--fstab:
LABEL=boot       /       ext3    defaults,errors=remount-ro 0 1

--menu.lst
title           Debian GNU/Linux, kernel 2.6.26-1-686
root            (hd0,0)
kernel          /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.26-1-686 root=LABEL=boot ro
initrd          /boot/initrd.img-2.6.26-1-686

however, kernel 2.6.22 does boot with this stanza:
title           Debian GNU/Linux, kernel 2.6.22-3-k7
root            (hd0,0)
kernel          /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.22-3-k7 root=LABEL=boot ro
initrd          /boot/initrd.img-2.6.22-3-k7


--/boot/grub/device.map
(fd0)   /dev/fd0
(hd0)   /dev/hdc
(hd1)   /dev/hdd


For me that indicates that the LABEL statements are correct.

As general recommendation from Google finds I updated initramfs:
update-initramfs -u -k 2.6.26-1-686

This resulted in a /boot/initrd.img-2.6.26-1-686 with the timestampt of
updating.

I fear that since the machine is running kernel 2.6.22 at the time of
update-initramfs, the update still doesn't know about how to handle sdc
instead of hdc.

Until now I have not found a way to get this system to boot correctly. Since
it was a fairly standard kernel upgrade, nothing fancy, no custom kernels
etc, I believe this is a bug.

It surprised me as well that after installing the linux-image package, the
menu.lst was not automagically updated with the new kernel stanza. I did
that manually. Not sure whether that is a bug though.

jlinkels