Re: Trouble booting a fresh built kernel--stuck on `loading initial ramdisk`

[deloptes <deloptes@gmail.com>]

Tony Fischetti wrote:

So what you are saying is that you run debian with 4.19.<whatever> and want
to build this same 4.19.<whatever> and can not boot cause not loading
initrd. Correct?

If true is strange because I would not expect to overwrite the current
image. You sure the build/installed new version is different than the one
you have?

> Any kernel I compile gets stuck on the "loading initial ramdisk"
> stage. It tried it multiple different ways and the result is always
> the same. Any advice on what I can do to find out what's going on,
> would be greatly appreciated
> 

do you have verbose enabled? it might tell you more

> More info: I'm using stable. The most recent attempt was basically as
> outlined in the most recent "Debian Administrator's Handbook".
> Concretely, installing linux-source (the one with the debian patches
> [4.19]), extracting it in another directory, using the kernel config
> from /boot/config-the-stock-kernel, make deb-pkg, and finally dpkg -i
> theheaders theimage
> 

I suggest after copying /boot/config-4.19.<whatever> to .config, you run
make menuconfig and set some custom kernel version
In General setup, for example

        (test1) Local version - append to kernel release

or like in the example
        make-kpkg --append-to-version -custom2-s390 --revision 2.6.26-19lenny2 \
      --initrd kernel_image

> I've tried a few other methods, too, like the method in the debian
> kernel handbook, etc...
> 
> I don't think it's a problem with the initrd because I inspected it
> (zcat / cpio / etc) and its not missing any files present in the stock
> initrd that works
> Thanks!

Other methods to debug this are IMO hard. Compare your final config with the
one that is working

AFAIK loading initrd is a read to memory process - so not rocket science
here. What is the trick that if compression is used - to be also compiled
in the kernel. I don't know what this is /boot/config-the-stock-kernel, but
the working one is to be found with 
        ls /boot/config-`uname -r`
take this as a base

regards