labelled root partitions ignored by udev(?) initramfs-tools(?) on 2.6.18-4
Hi,
I have been trying out linux-image-2.6.18-4-686-bigmem on sarge.
It works pretty well once I can get it booted, however there is a
serious boot-time problem. I don't know if anyone else has hit this.
What happens is:
* all the partitions are mounted by label in /etc/fstab, and all
the partitions are labelled (correctly).
* the system starts to boot and gets to scripts/local, where it prints
"Waiting for root file system..."
* the system waits for a couple of minutes and then fails with
" Check root= bootarg cat /proc/cmdline"
" or missing modules, devices: cat /proc/modules ls /dev"
* I get dropped into a shell. If I do
# ls -l /dev/disk/by-label
I can see symlinks for each of the partitions except for the root
partition. The root partition (there is no separate /boot) is
sda2, see table below.
* If I make the symlink myself, I am able to boot:
# cd /dev/disk/by-label
# ln -s ../../sda2 root
# exit
I also tried root=UUID=<whatever> and this fails in the exact same way;
all the partitions except the / partition are listed in /dev/disk/by-uuid
and the manual symlink trick works.
This all works on a pure-etch system. The system I am having the failure
on is a sarge+backports system, the only 'testing' packages are from
backports.org. I thought this worked on a previous backported kernel
but I can't confirm this.
I can't see any related bug reports in the bpo list archives nor in
the b.d.o pages for the packages listed below. I took a look at the
initramfs-tools scripts but could not see any place this problem
could come from.
Some help would be greatly appreciated.
Cheers,
Vince
Additional info
---------------
I'm using grub to boot, with this entry:
title Debian GNU/Linux, kernel 2.6.18-4-686-bigmem
root (hd0,1)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.18-4-686-bigmem root=LABEL=root ro console=tty0 console=ttyS0,9600n8
initrd /boot/initrd.img-2.6.18-4-686-bigmem
savedefault
partition table
Disk /dev/sda: 73.2 GB, 73274490880 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 8908 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 1 5 40131 6 FAT16
/dev/sda2 6 67 498015 83 Linux
/dev/sda3 68 1283 9767520 82 Linux swap /
Solaris
/dev/sda4 1284 8908 61247812+ 5 Extended
/dev/sda5 1284 1648 2931831 83 Linux
/dev/sda6 1649 1891 1951866 83 Linux
/dev/sda7 1892 2134 1951866 83 Linux
/dev/sda8 2135 3350 9767488+ 83 Linux
/dev/sda9 3351 8908 44644603+ 83 Linux
Software version numbers
etch backport
linux-image 2.6.18-3-686 2.6.18-4-686-bigmem
(2.6.18-7) (2.6.18.dfsg.1-10~bpo.1)
udev 0.105-3 0.103-2~bpo.1
initramfs-tools 0.85f 0.85e~bpo.1
module-init-tools 3.3-pre4-2 3.3-pre4-1~bpo.1
initrd-tools 0.1.84.2 0.1.81.1
Reply to: