[release+kernel] upgrade headache
Hi, sorry this is BIG post.Some background first, FWIW:
-I installed Debian/Potato back when it was *frozen*, on a newly
assembled machine without another OS -before that I'd been using
slackware for a few years (on a different, dual-boot machine),
installing new stuff from source, and getting through several
kernel upgrades and the libc5 -> libc6 thing.
-After the pain that dselect gave me when first installing debian
(because of UI annoyances and wanting to keep *out* certain software)
I've only ever used plain old dpkg for installing packages since
then. I'm a luddite, so sue me.
ANYHOW. Because of various driver bugs and stuff, I've been wanting
to upgrade my kernel to 2.4 series and XFree to 4.x, so I was pleased
to see Woody was coming out soon. But as it seems like it's not going
to be officially released for a fair while now, I decided to bite
the bullet and try installing the important stuff anyway.
So I started yesterday. Despite all the worrying about new glibc2.2
making all my old 2.1 binaries fail, Woody's libc6 package installed
painlessly. So did many other things I needed to install the new
kernel (I tested most things with dpkg --no-act --install first).
Then I got to the kernel. I'd got all its stated dependencies installed,
even the ones in the official kernel 2.4 "Changes" file that aren't
mentioned in the .deb. It then told me something about trying to install
an initrd kernel and how I'd have to set a line in my lilo.conf to
point to an initrd image.
I'd only heard of initrd stuff vaguely before, but this seemed to be
saying it was a new boot requirement. I'd seen no mention of this
mentioned anywhere on the debian site. I looked through the lilo
documentation (from Potato's lilo, as the kernel hadn't depended on
a newer one), but there was *no mention* of this parameter. Upgrading
lilo and manpages, I found the reference and changed the lilo.conf file.
I then tried again to install the new 2.4 kernel. It still gave the
warning about needing the initrd line, and asked if I wanted to continue,
I said Y. In time, it finished, and I shutdown and rebooted.
After about a page of the kernel bootup messages, I got:
request_module[block-major-8]:Root fs not mounted
VFS: Cannot open root device "801" or 08:01
Please append a correct "root=" boot option
Kernel panic: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on 08:01
Well, after an hour or so, I spotted the old rescue disk from when
I first installed (I'd given up looking by then) and managed to
get back into the machine and change the /vmlinuz back to the 2.2
kernel, so the system can now boot again and I'm reasonably relaxed.
OTOH, I was truly fuming *then* because there hadn't been the
slightest indication that I could see that the kernel package I
chose would *not* support booting from SCSI, like my old kernel
packages were able to do.
I looked into the mkinitrd docs, and it seems that the initrd
thing allows the boot-loader to load the ramdisk image along with
the kernel and the kernel can load modules for things it needs
for booting from there, whereas previously such drivers would
need to be compiled in. Well, that's very nice, but:
-(1) The package (or *one* package) should have been set up to be
able to boot properly without user intervention;
-(2) The mkinitrd docs seem hard to follow;
-(3) Having used mkinitrd several times, trying various things with
its config files, I *still* cannot get an initrd image that will
get the kernel to boot. It does appear that the advansys.o,
scsi_mod.o, sd_mod.o, ext2.o files *are* already in the image- but
the kernel doesn't seem interested in loading them.
In fact, I've not even seen reference to initrd in the messages
when booting the 2.4 kernel.
Also on this subject, what *exactly* is the "bf2.4" kernel version
that is there? I've not seen any explanation of this. Is it relevant
to this?
Advice please?
Tom Barnes-Lawrence (AKA Tomble)
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