Kernel suddenly wants devfs and gives kernel panic
I have a machine which has been happily running a customer kernel 2.4.20 for
a while now. Yesterday I needed to add in support for a USB mouse and a USB
floppy drive (the machine has no floppy built in) and first I installed
hotplug so that it would auto-configure the floppy drive - which it did.
Then I use make xconfig to load the old config file, change it to include
the USB HID support, save it as a new config, rebuild the kernel using
make-kpkg and dpkg -i the resulting deb. Then the fun started.
When I rebooted the kernel gets to the place where it loads the RAMDISK
(being a 2.4 kernel I have --initrd support, and have had for a while)
and then the next thing it reports is that has freed up unused kernel
memory, that it can not open /etc/mtab, and then it complains that modprobe
can not load devfs. After a few more messages along the same lines the
kernel stops with a panic.
Now I have looked at /etc/fstab, and there is absolutely NO reference to
devfs at all, not even in a comment and not even in a file whose name starts
/etc/fstab (there are none).
I have double checked the config, and the only change is the one about
USB HID support, the DEVFS options are all turned off. diff tells me that
the only difference is to the line defining CONFIG_USB_HIDINPUT which is
now set to y.
I realised that although I had installed hotplug I had not installed usbutils,
so I tried that, but is makes no difference.
The alternate kernel I have installed (2.2.20-idepci) starts without problems.
Anyone got any ideas why this might be happening?
Regards
David
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