kernel panic: Attempted to kill init!

[Rob Landley]

On Monday 21 November 2005 06:47, bin sun wrote:
> hi:
>   i'm porting linux to motorola lite5200 board:
>   linux kernel version:linux 2.6.14.2

Then why do your boot messages say 2.4.25?

>   root file system: randisk

Not initramfs?  Are you sure you're using a 2.6 system?

>   busybox:busybox-1.00-pre8
>   tinylogin:tinylogin-1.4

Those are kind of old.  Tinylogin got merged into busybox quite some time ago, 
and you're using a pre-1.0 release when we've already had a 1.01 and have a 
prerelease of 1.1 out already.

> Linux version 2.4.25 (sb at localhost.localdomain) (gcc
> version 3.3.3 (DENX ELDK 3.
> 1.1 3.3.3-10)) #1 二 11月 15 19:23:00 CST 2005
> On node 0 totalpages: 16384

Once again, that's not looking like 2.6.  And this is relevant because older 
versions of 2.4 had a bug where when they ran init, they wouldn't set argv[0] 
to say "init", which would confuse busybox.


> VFS: Mounted root (ext2 filesystem).
> Freeing unused kernel memory: 76k init
> BusyBox v1.00-pre8 (2005.11.21-08:09+0000) multi-call
> binary
>
> Usage: busybox [function] [arguments]...
>    or: [function] [arguments]...
>
>         BusyBox is a multi-call binary that combines
> many common Unix
>         utilities into a single executable.  Most
> people will create a
>         link to busybox for each function they wish to
> use, and BusyBox
>         will act like whatever it was invoked as.
>
> Currently defined funKctions:
>         [, ash, basename, busybox, cat, chgrp, chmod,
> chown, chroot, clear,
>         cp, cut, date, dd, df, dirname, dmesg, du,
> echo, env, false, fgrep,
>         find, free, grep, gunzip, gzip, halt, head,
> hostname, id, ifconfig,
>         init, kill, killall, klogd, ln, logger, ls,
> mesg, mkedir, mknod,
>         more, mount, mv, nslookup, ping, poweroff, ps,
> pwd, reboot, reset,
>         rm, rmdir, route, sed, sh, sleep, sort, sync,
> syslogd, tail, tar,
>         test, touch, true, tty, umount, uname, uniq,
> uptime, which, whoami,
>         yes, zcat

And that looks like exactly what's happening to you.  Busybox is not 
recognizing the name it's being called under, because argv[0] contains 
something other than "init".  Which was a 2.4 bug.  Fixed in more recent 
releases of the 2.4 kernel, I believe...

> please tell me what's the problem

You're using old versions of things with known bugs long since fixed?  That's 
my first guess...

Rob