[uClibc] Linux 2.6 ROMFS vs EXT2

[Denis Vlasenko]

On Thursday 11 March 2004 00:07, Pete Flugstad wrote:
> Greetings all!
>
>    I'm having problems booting a ROMFS buildroot image, and I'm hoping
> someone can point out my idiotic mistake somewhere.  I know this might
> not be the exact right forum for this, but I'm hoping you'll overlook
> that, or point me in the right direction.
>
>    Hardware is a mini-ITX motherboard using Intel i875 chipset.  Boot
> device is a serial ATA hard drive (which shows up as /dev/sda).  I'm
> using Linux 2.6 as the Linux 2.4 kernel didn't like this hardware and
> will consistently lock up during ide detection.
>
>    I've created a single FAT16 partition on the hard drive with fdisk
> and made it bootable.  I installed SYSLINUX and my vmlinuz on the
> partition and setup SYSLINUX to boot it with initrd.gz as root.
>
>    I grabed the buildroot.tar.gz from
>
>        http://www.uclibc.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb/buildroot/
>
>    and loaded it onto a Debian unstable box.  Ran make, answered the
> processor instructions (mostly standard Intel P4 box) and let it run.
> I end up with a 10MB (or so) root_fs_i386 image.
>
>    If I gzip root_fs_i386 and copy that to boot device as initrd.gz,
> everything works just fine.
>
>    But if I mount root_fs_i386 using loopback mount, then genromfs using
> it:
>
>      genromfs -d /mnt/root_fs_i386 -f initrd
>
>    I get:
>
>      kernel panic: VFS: unable to mount root fs on ram0
>
>    So, why is the genromfs route failing?  I'm missing something vital
> here, but I've been beating my head against it all day, but I can't for
> the life of me figure out what.

One possible reason is romfs not compiled in or is a module.
Check whether your kernel can mount romfs.
--
vda