I've got a machine that has been running Debian for a long time. Its root partition is software raid0. It uses a custom kernel, 2.4.22, which does not use initrd. Instead all necessary modules for booting are built into the kernel: hardware drivers, md, etc. The kernel is configured to mounts devfs at boot time. I would like to upgrade the machine to a stock Debian kernel package. This almost works: the stock 2.6.6 kernel and its configured initrd detects the hardware properly, seems to have the right hardware and md modules in the initrd image, etc. Things are set up to mount devfs (see below). The problem seems to be that as the system boots, at some point before devfs is mounted but after the root partition is, /dev, which will ultimately be shadowed by devfs, is missing something important. In particular, it would seem to be missing /dev/console. Obviously I could mknod it, and maybe look in the initrd image and mknod any other device nodes hanging out in there. But I can't figure out any way to get my fingers on the "real" /dev, since it is shadowed by devfs and devfs won't unmount!
The fact that the machine is in Albuquerque and I am in Ireland, and the machine is used as a server for a number of projects, doesn't help. I can ask someone in Albuquerque to do stuff on the console, but I'd rather have it be minimal and foolproof rather than exploratory and risky. Any thoughts or suggestions? -- Barak A. Pearlmutter <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Hamilton Institute, NUI Maynooth, Co. Kildare, Ireland http://www-bcl.cs.may.ie/~barak/ ---------------------------------------------------------------- OTHER INFO $ uname --kernel-name --kernel-release Linux 2.4.22 $ cat /etc/default/devfsd # mount point for devfs MOUNTPOINT=/dev # mount on boot? MOUNT=yes $ df / Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on /dev/md/0 113424288 99712476 7950112 93% / $ cat /proc/mounts rootfs / rootfs rw 0 0 /dev/root / ext3 rw 0 0 none /dev devfs rw 0 0 proc /proc proc rw 0 0 devpts /dev/pts devpts rw 0 0 tmpfs /dev/shm tmpfs rw 0 0 /dev/hda3 /boot ext3 rw 0 0 usbfs /proc/bus/usb usbfs rw 0 0 $ egrep -i DEVFS /boot/config-2.4.22 CONFIG_DEVFS_FS=y CONFIG_DEVFS_MOUNT=y # CONFIG_DEVFS_DEBUG is not set -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
