I just spent the better part of a day trying to find out why one of my
servers refused to boot any kernels newer than 2.6.24-17-server. After
countless hours of debugging, it turns out that the size of my
initrd.img's had grown ever so slightly, but it was just enough to push
it over a critical threshold that made lilo fail to boot in rather
mysterious ways. I've attached a screenshot of the boot failure do
demonstrate how non-obvious the cause is.
These are the relevant sizes:
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 8216636 2008-05-13 13:10
/boot/initrd.img-2.6.24-17-server
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 8255405 2008-08-20 14:56
/boot/initrd.img-2.6.24-19-server
The former boots just fine, the latter.. not so much. So the limit is
somewhere in between those two. The system has both -updates and
-security enabled, but even with just -security, it's quite conceivable
that someone might pass the threshold, and suddenly find themselves with
systems that fail to boot. The fix is simple: Add the "large-memory"
option in lilo.conf and rerun lilo.
I propose that we put large-memory in the default lilo.conf from now on,
and add a check to lilo that will tell the user that their initrd.img is
over a certain size and that they might want to add the "large-memory"
option to lilo.conf. This *definitely* needs to go into an SRU, IMNSHO.
this is really, but is not a ubuntu bug. this is a kernel problem.
** Changed in: lilo (Ubuntu)
Status: Confirmed => Fix Released
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lilo needs to warn if initrd is too large
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/260059
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