[BusyBox] followup on mount oddity from my previous email

[Robert P. J. Day]

On Thu, 11 Dec 2003, Rob Landley wrote:

> On Thursday 11 December 2003 15:31, Robert P. J. Day wrote:
> > On Thu, 11 Dec 2003, Erik Andersen wrote:
> > > On Thu Dec 11, 2003 at 07:59:02AM -0500, Robert P. J. Day wrote:
> > > > mount: Mounting /dev/root on / failed: No such file or directory
> > > > rm: unable to remove `/etc/mtab': Read-only file system
> > > > ln: /etc/mtab: File exists
> > > > Mounting local file systems...
> > >
> > > [---------snip---------]
> > >
> > > >   any hints?  am i missing something obvious?  i'm not sure why
> > > > replacing a real mount executable to a link to a mount-enabled busybox
> > > > would start causing these errors.
> > >
> > > I suspect you have CONFIG_FEATURE_MTAB_SUPPORT disabled, and
> > > you system is setup expecting it to be enabled,
> >
> > um ... ok, one of the other respondents suggested it should be *off*.
> > i'll try it both ways and see what happens.
> 
> Presumably, if support for it is off, it shouldn't try to modify it.  (Unless 
> one of your scripts is doing that.  The above looks like rm and ln are being 
> called on /etc/mtab on a filesystem that's mounted read only.  Presumably, ln 
> is being called to link it to /proc/mounts, but shouldn't the link be part of 
> the read only filesystem already, rather than set up by the init scripts 
> (which can't modify a read only filesystem?))
> 
> I'm still not quite sure what the problem you're having is, because I haven't 
> seen your system.  All I know is it smells like you don't want real mtab 
> support, or you probably wouldn't be calling ln to create /etc/mtab...

i've tried it both ways (with and without mtab support), same error either
way.  and remember, the boot process worked fine with a pre-built 0.60.2
version of busybox, and now doesn't work so well with my home-rolled 
version of 1.00-pre4.  sadly, i don't have the config file from the 
earlier version, but it certainly seems safe to conclude that there's
*some* option that doesn't match between the two builds that would be the 
cause of all this, no?  i've tried tweaking several different settings to
no avail.

rday