Xen users - Aug 2006 - don''t use kernel with initrd when installing xen instances

Hi,
I just had a good while of time wasted when finding this out:

When installing a xen instance with FAI, and having it configured to
use and initrd, the root file system won''t get mounted. The vm hangs
on the message:

Boot: waiting for root file system

and after a while it just runs the busybox system contained in the initrd.
I finally found out that the only difference between other systems
where i made FAI installations and the one I tried to install was the
initrd, removed it, and everything was working fine.
I am not so deep into the functioning of the initrd, but probably the
root mounting process via ramdisk doesn''t allow another change of the
root file system to the nfs root somehow.

In "normal" FAI install mode this problem probably doesn''t
occur
because either the fai-kernels don''t use an initrd or they have an
initrd that don''t have this problem - I didn''t check that yet.

Henning

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Oops, that was supposed to be an information for the fai users mailing list...
But it might also be as useful to people willing to install xen vm''s
with FAI (http://faiwiki.informatik.uni-koeln.de) , which is quite
useful when having multiple different classes (and combinations of
classes) of systems to install.

Henning

On 8/14/06, Henning Sprang <henning_sprang@gmx.de>
wrote:
> Hi,
> I just had a good while of time wasted when finding this out:
>
> When installing a xen instance with FAI, and having it configured to
> use and initrd, the root file system won''t get mounted. The vm
hangs
> on the message:
>
> Boot: waiting for root file system
>
> and after a while it just runs the busybox system contained in the initrd.
> I finally found out that the only difference between other systems
> where i made FAI installations and the one I tried to install was the
> initrd, removed it, and everything was working fine.
> I am not so deep into the functioning of the initrd, but probably the
> root mounting process via ramdisk doesn''t allow another change of
the
> root file system to the nfs root somehow.
>
> In "normal" FAI install mode this problem probably
doesn''t occur
> because either the fai-kernels don''t use an initrd or they have an
> initrd that don''t have this problem - I didn''t check that
yet.
>
> Henning
>
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