Amax wrote:
Thanks for your input. Ever since I wrote about those late problems, things have changed a lot here. I got convinced that I would go no further with my old Sarge distro : old kernels could no longer get compiled with newer tools, and, as far as building newer kernels, the initrd image that I got using mkinitrd did not fit my system and wouldn't allow boot. So, I decided to get a more recent distro. Since there was 'Etch' in between Sarge and Lenny, I figured that I could not just upgrade, maybe I was wrong, in any case, I just saved whatever had to be kept, and I installed Lenny from scratch. This was about 6 days ago. On my new Lenny, I was able to recompile my kernel, but it has not been so easy. I could not get the official process to work here, using make-kpkg with --initrd. It did compile indeed, and gave a kernel image and an initrd image, but that did not boot either. However, using plain old 'make', then make_install, then make_modules_install, then, not mkinitrd, but initramfs, I got what I needed, and my new kernel boots all right.On Tue, 25 Aug 2009 00:50:10 +0200, Bernard wrote: <----- snip ------>Sorry if I'm misunderstanding, but are you saying that although you've included 'make --initrd . . ' in your compile command sequence, you are still not getting an appropriate initrd.img?The initrd.img that I have on my working system, as well as those initrd.img that 'mkinitrd' generates when requested, are not compressed files. Filenames are : initrd.img-2.6.20-16-386 for instance. No .gz behind. I still tried to gunzip one, just in case that would still be a compressed file without usual extension, but no, it is not handled by gunzip or zcat. I tried cpio on that file as is, but I got : 'cpio: premature end of file'. a 'vi filename' shows that this is a binary file. No point to edit then. So, at this point, I don't have a clue of how to build an initrd.img file that would allow my newly compiled 2.6.30.4 kernel to boot on my system.then edit init to match my needs i.e. depmod, modprobe, cryptsetup etc and finally put a line to run the real init. I then zip it find . ! -name *~ | cpio -H newc --create | gzip -9 > ../test-initrd.gz I can install then the new initrd (cp ../test-initrd.gz /boot/initrd....gz) Once you've done it it's very simple and easy ... before it was a big trouble for me too. Just look positive as way to learn something new about your operating system. reagrdsThis appears to be some kind of bug in the 2.6.30 kernel & I've managed to solve this by using the "update-initramfs -c -k linux-2.6.30-x-custom" command. After doing this, check your /boot to see if there is, in fact, a new 'initrd.img-2.6.30-x-custom' file. If there is, update your grub or lilo & reboot.I've compiled 5 different versions of the 2.6.30-x kernel & had to do this in each one.The developers know about this but so far haven't done squat about it - maybe they consider it a low priority or something.Hope this helps . . . ~A~