[BusyBox] Problem with Initrd Images(cramfs) on thin client using busybox

Anes Lihovac anes.lihovac at web.de
Tue May 3 12:15:49 UTC 2005


Hi all

I have made an initrd image for a thin client. The image is packed with
mkcramfs to one big image and everything runs great like expected.
I can start X, fire up Firefox and so on. The image and Kernel
are flashed to a Compact Flash Card( 64 MB) which is formatted ext2.
Grub is also installed on the flash which loads the kernel and the
big Image as initrd.

Then I have split up the big image in modules (root(busybox),X, icewm,
firefox ...). I did this cause I would like to be able to update the
modules on the fly, if e.g. a newer version / bug fix is released for the
specific module. So, I copied all the modules to to Compact Flash Card 
and mounted them via loop during startup.

This looks kinda like this:
------------------------------------
#mount compact flash to /mnt
mount -n -t ext2 /dev/hda1 /mnt

#now mount the modules via loop from flash
mount -n -t cramfs /mnt/X11R6.img /usr/X11R6
mount -n -t cramfs /mnt/icewm.img /icewm
...
..
-----------------------------------------------------------

The system starts up fine, and all the modules are mounted like expected.
I can see all the X libs and binaries in the right places, which indicates 
that mounting was fine.

Now the problem is, that when I want to start X, I get an segmentation fault 
and Kernel oops.
I tried to strace the call, but even the strace will seg fault and oops too.
The only thing which is running is ash(the busybox default shell), and 
telnetd. I can telnet into the running box, but whenever I do
e.g. startx, this will segfault and oops.

I have mounted /tmp read-writeable and set HOME to /tmp, so writing 
lock files and authority for X is not the problem.

I am running Kernel 2.6.8.1 and busybox is latest released (1.0).
My next test would be to try a newer Kernel, but I am not that confident.
Maybe this is an ash problem, but I don't know (not sure).
If anyone has an idea, please let me know.

Thanks in advance and best regards.
Anes



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