Hi Juan! > could you check if Mandrake kernel 2.4.17 (either linus or Mandrake) > boots for you? it took a while to found that damned bug here, but now > I am able to boot all my machines with/whithout devfs (with plain > 2.4.17 they just hang during boot as yours).
I needed to reverse apply the patch. Ok, I still cannot boot (did not try the linus kernel as downloading 10 MB is not cheap over modem line..). The results without devfs are the same as before. The result with devfs is: error 16 (device or resource busy) when mounting ext3 /dev/root, mknod fails with error 17 (file exists). (there is no difference whether I use the original mkinitrd from 8.1 or the cooker mkinitrd). I don't think that the devfs_mk_symlink is the cause of the problem as the messages show that the root device is mounted: EXT3-fs: mounted filesystem with ordered data mode. For some reason it cannot be accessed (or better: I have not found a method to find out how to prove if /dev/root is really mounted, the only thing I found out is that ls cannot be executed from disk). I also looked at the pivot_root function in fs/namespace.c. This function again seems to indicate that the root fs is not mounted. I just don't understand why it fails. I compared several files between 2.4.16 and 2.4.17 but I was unable to find a real reason why mounting should fail (especially if devfs is disabled). My kernel does not mount devfs by default: CONFIG_DEVFS_FS=y # CONFIG_DEVFS_MOUNT is not set # CONFIG_DEVFS_DEBUG is not set Regards, Reinhard Katzmann -- Software-Engineer, Developer for Embedded Devices Project: HyperPen Tablet USB Driver for Linux GnuPG Public Key available on request
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