Re: problem compiling kernel

[Bernard <bdebreil@teaser.fr>]

Emanoil Kotsev wrote:

> Emanoil Kotsev wrote:
>
>  
>
> > Sorry forgot to write
> >
> > Yes there is problem compiling the 2.6.20 with recent gcc
> >
> > The problem is the compiler. If you are compiling just grab the last
> > version from kernel.org.
> >
> > 2.6.30.4 seems to be working fine
> >
> >    
>
> Just to be objective the gnu compiler people said kernel people are wrong
> and vice versa. I didn't follow the discussion. I'm glad next kernels
> compile
>
> regards
>
>
>
>
>  

2.6.30.4 does compile all right, so does 2.6.26, but 2.6.20 does not. Problem is that I still can't boot those I compiled, i.e. 2.6.26. because the initrd.img is buggy. I did find something, still it is not enough to get the process to work. In my 

/etc/mkinitrd/mkinitrd.conf file, I found a modified line :

# Command to generate the initrd image.
# MKIMAGE='mkcramfs %s %s > /dev/null' this has been changed august 19, 2009

MKIMAGE='genromfs -d %s -f %s'

The change date has not been written by me, so this must be a conf file that came with a recent package upgrade that I did. I tried uncommenting the old line, commenting the new one instead. MKIMAGE='mkcramfs... became active. What gave me this idea, is that in those error messages that I could see at crash, it was matter of cramfs.

Well that change made mkinitrd to produce smaller images. I tried installing them in the grub boot menu, and then, now, the boot crashes do not happen at the same time as before... but it still crashes !

I could do nothing else than catch photos of my screen, since no log file are recorded in such cases.

http://www.teaser.fr/~bdebreil/bootcrash1.jpg

and

http://www.teaser.fr/~bdebreil/bootcrash2.jpg

will show you what I got

The first crash screen is not very informative :
"
could not load '/lib/modules... no such files"

(these files exist, but at this point in time it is not in the /boot partition, therefore not mounted as yet). This crash came from a kernel which I had configure to have RAID inside, not as modules. While watching the boot logs of my working kernel, I could see that RAID was as modules. So, I recompiled a new kernel with modules for RAID, and then boot went a little bit further, as can be seen in the screen picture at crash :

'raid1 set md1 active with 2 out of 2 mirrors

mdadm : /dev/md1 has been started with 2 drives'

but then :

'mkdir cannot create directory '/devfs/vg00' : read only filesystem
..................
....................
failure to communicate to kernel device mapper driver
incompatible libdevmapper 1.01.00-ioctl (2005-01-17) (compat) and kernel driver'

I think that this last quoted line does most explain that the tools I am using are not appropriate.

I have good grounds to think that the problems are in my initrd.img file... but there may also be something wrong in the compiled kernel image.

Could someone please tell me what tool packages to purge and what to install instead so that I can recompile a 2.6.26 or 2.6.30 kernel that will boot on my Debian 3.1 system with raid 1 ?

Thanks in advance for your help