Gentoo: Kernel problems remain.

[Collins Richey]

On Sun, 02 Jan 2005 20:16:31 -0500, Matthew Carpenter <matt at eisgr.com> wrote:
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> Alrighty sports-fans.  The kernel issues continue.  I am a little
> confused at this moment.  Perhaps I do not know my new laptop's hardware
> ~ as well as I thought.  There are two main mental-looptyloops I'm having:
> 
> The Genkernel image has the following appended to the kernel line:
>         root=/dev/ram0 real_root=/dev/hdc7 init=/linuxrc
> 
> My kernel, of course, has no such nonsense, but rather:
>         root=/dev/hdc7
> but of course adding this nonsense doesn't help.  Could somebody please
> explain what I'm witnessing here, and is it a Gentoo-patch or some
> alternative way of booting which I am not aware of? (not that it
> necessarily makes a difference, but I had run genkernel on this and then
> reconfigured and compiled without cleaning anything up.)

What you are looking at is the beauty (or incredible ugliness, IMO) of
the gentoo genkernel procedure. Like in many other distros, genkernel
generates a kernel with every imaginable module and an initrd to load
those modules into /dev/ram0 that must be loaded prior to the init
stage of booting.

<rant>
My recommendation is, generate a kernel with the necessary things
compiled as builtin (file systems for sure), and then you can use the
procedures that $DEITY and kernel developers intended since the dawn
of time.
</rant>

Some people love genkernel, and for some people it works reliably. For
others, it fails miserably for unknown reasons.

> 
> The boot issue seems to boot things mostly up, but after loading the md
> driver, I get:
> VFS: Cannot open root device "hdc7" or unkown-block(22,7)
> Please append a correct "root=" boot option
> Kernel panic - not syncing: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on
> unknown-block(22,7)
> 
> Any pointers?

See recommendation above. It appears that you don't have the
appropriate file system module available for your / filesystem, but
that shouldn't happen, so I'm at a loss to tell you how to fix
genkernel. You'll be much better off going through the one-time grief
of generating your own kernel config, presuming of course that you do
know your hardware. Read up in the genkernel doco. There should be
something you can tweak to fix this problem, but I don't have a clue
what nor do I care since I never use it. Friends don't let friends use
genkernel!

HTH,

-- 
 Collins