unable to open initial console

[Thomas Lange]

Hi folks,

I just want to explain a certain error message, which costs me a
certain amount of time.

After the kernel was booted and has freed some memory and mounted its
nfsroot, it says "unable to open initial console" and reboots. No red
FAI logo or anything else.

This error was caused by the NFS option v3 which I specified in
dhcpd.conf or even in the pxelinux.cfg file. With NFS version 3 the
nfs client seems to be more fussy if the nfsroot is only exported in
read-only mode. Since the kernel likes to open a console and therefore 
thinks he needs write access to /dev he's complaining if the nfsroot
(and /dev) is only read only. This does not happen if the kernels
mounts the nfsroot with NFS v2.

Hope this helps other FAI users.

BTW: remounting nfsroot later with v3 does not work :-(

-- 
regards Thomas