live-initramfs

[Henning Fehrmann]

On Thu, Jan 08, 2009 at 07:43:23PM +0100, Thomas Lange wrote:
> >>>>> On Thu, 8 Jan 2009 19:36:35 +0100, Henning Fehrmann <henning.fehrmann at aei.mpg.de> said:
> 
>     > I guess, a proper initrd has to come already with the kernel.
> not really, because dpkg-reconfigure linux-image... should be called,
> which creates the initrd.

Ok, I am stepping forward. In fact, the aufs module has been
missing. Sorry, my fault. 
Actually, compiling the aufs modules is not really straight
forward since one needs the right combination of aufs sources and
kernel sources. I took the debian patched 2.6.26 kernel sources and  
the 0+20080719-4 aufs source.

make-fai-nfsroot is finishing without error messages. There have been
some warning about the md issues which are not important for us right
now.


The client boots, reads the initrd and ends up in the a-shell with the
following message:

Gave up waiting for root device.  Common problems:
 - Boot args (cat /proc/cmdline)
   - Check rootdelay= (did the system wait long enough?)
   - Check root= (did the system wait for the right device?)
 - Missing modules (cat /proc/modules; ls /dev)
ALERT! /dev/nfs does not exist. Dropping to a shell!

The nic is up and running:

(initramfs) ifconfig eth1
eth1      Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 
          inet addr:10.10.16.79  Bcast:10.255.255.255  Mask:255.0.0.0
          UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST  MTU:9000  Metric:1
          RX packets:6152 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
          TX packets:13 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
          collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000 
          RX bytes:456240 (445.5 KiB)  TX bytes:1746 (1.7 KiB)
          Memory:ee200000-ee220000 


(initramfs) ping -c 1  10.10.16.78
PING 10.10.16.78 (10.10.16.78): 56 data bytes
64 bytes from 10.10.16.78: seq=0 ttl=64 time=0.099 ms

--- 10.10.16.78 ping statistics ---
1 packets transmitted, 1 packets received, 0% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max = 0.099/0.099/0.099 ms
(initramfs) mount -t nfs 10.10.16.78:/srv/fai/nfsroot/live/filesystem.dir /root
mount: mounting 10.10.16.78:/srv/fai/nfsroot/live/filesystem.dir on /root failed: Invalid argument


NFS support is compiled into the kernel.

I would guess the problem is the missing /deb/nfs in the intrd.
If I omit the initrd the nfs-export is being mounted in the installation environment, but unfortunately, readonly.

Any hints?

Thank you,
Henning Fehrmann