kernel panic - one step further.

[akonstam at trinity.edu]

First let me thank Boris Glawe for showing me how to gunzip the
initrd...img
file, mount it and find out what commands are run in a boot.

Now I assume, correct me if I am wrong during the boot process the
filesystem in the initrd file is mounted on /initrc and a chroot is
performed.

I can see the commands in the linuxrec file that are executed under
the nash shell. Just focusing on those that are needed to explain the
problem. Most of the commands succeed, although what a command like:
mount -t proc /proc /proc 
does is still a mystery, but it is successful, I think.
The problem starts with this command:
mkrootdev /dev/root - which is a nash shell command to make a device
with that name that is to be root device based on the information in
the kernel line in grub.conf.

Things continue on without any apparent errors until we get to the
command: mount -o defaults --ro -t ext3 /dev/root /sysroot
This fails with a mount error  6 which is an or of two errors:
2      system error (out of memory, cannot fork, no more loop devices)
4      internal mount bug or missing nfs support in mount

Now this is a machine with only 128M of ram. Has anyone tried to run
FC2  on a machine with that small a ram. I know RedHat says its
possible but who knows.

Then the:
pivot_root /sysroot /sysroot/initrd gets an error 2 but that is
probably because of the mount error.

Can any  one shed any further light on all this?

-- 
-------------------------------------------
Aaron Konstam
Computer Science
Trinity University
One Trinity Place.
San Antonio, TX 78212-7200

telephone: (210)-999-7484
email:akonstam at trinity.edu