Booting Arch from SD

deuns · 2008-04-09 19:24:00

Hi, I have made a manual Arch install on a 2GB SD card, and I haven't succeeded in booting it.
Basically I formatted it as ext2, mounted it under some directory, installed the pkgs, starting with filesystem, the base utilities (with pacman -r). Then I installed xorg + kde, so far everything's ok.

My hardware is a laptop with the TI 7xx1 card reader, that isn't mass storage (the driver is tifm_sd), so I cannot boot it from BIOS, and grub can't use it either. So I'm using the grub from my hdd, with kernel26 and a custom initcpio. I have put "MODULES="tifm_sd tifm_7xx1 mmc_block" in my ramdisk, my modules are loaded, and my mmcblk0p1 node gets created successfully at boot time.

I booted with "kernel /boot/vmlinuz26 root=/dev/mmcblk0p1 ro pci=routeirq"

And now I'm stuck with the following:

kinit: mounted root (ext2 filesystem) readonly.
sh: root=/dev/mmcblk0p1: No such file or directory

The error happens in some script apparently, but I can't find which.

Can somebody experimented with the boot system help ? At the moment I am not interested in a fully-functional system, it's just for a performance test, and I'd just like to get past the init stuff.

Thanks!

lilsirecho · 2008-04-09 20:21:07

The device named........mmcblk0p1 ..... which apparently is /devmmcblk0 partition1...is not a recognized /dev naming scheme.

You may have to use a link but that may also not be recognized, AFAICT.

.:B:. · 2008-04-09 22:37:58

I don't know if symlinks are followed during the boot process (I think not - I once tried to mount a device through a udev symlink and I always got ext3 superblock errors while the disk was mighty fine).

Normally the /dev/mmcblk0p1 is a link to /dev/mmcblk0/1 or something similar (anyway, you get the idea). Try specifiying the direct path, that should work.

Last edited by B (2008-04-09 22:41:57)

iphitus · 2008-04-10 08:35:24

The kernel doesnt know anything about /dev/ or any symlinks there. Remember, at boot time, /dev is near empty and udev isnt running. /dev/sda or /dev/hda just gets translated by the kernel to what it understands

AFAIK the kernel does understand uuid's, so if you can get a uuid for the sd card, that might work.

James

brain0 · 2008-04-10 11:48:49

iphitus wrote:

The kernel doesnt know anything about /dev/ or any symlinks there. Remember, at boot time, /dev is near empty and udev isnt running. /dev/sda or /dev/hda just gets translated by the kernel to what it understands
AFAIK the kernel does understand uuid's, so if you can get a uuid for the sd card, that might work.

Luckily, the kernel isn't the one that mounts the root filesystem, and even better, udev is running at that time.

brain0 · 2008-04-10 11:51:18

deuns wrote:

I booted with "kernel /boot/vmlinuz26 root=/dev/mmcblk0p1 ro pci=routeirq"
And now I'm stuck with the following:
kinit: mounted root (ext2 filesystem) readonly.
sh: root=/dev/mmcblk0p1: No such file or directory
The error happens in some script apparently, but I can't find which.

The first line suggests that your root filesystem was mounted successfully. You didn't happen to add init=/bin/sh to the kernel commandline? That is somehow broken. Otherwise I cannot make sense of the second line, as no 'sh' process should be involved now, but control should be given to the init process.

deuns · 2008-04-10 20:14:36

I had a look at the kinit source code today, and found my problem in run_init. In fact the error message was printed in kinit, and completely misleading. I just had to add the init binary, from the sysvinit pkg.
Problem solved. Thanks

Arch Linux

#1 2008-04-09 19:24:00

Booting Arch from SD

#2 2008-04-09 20:21:07

Re: Booting Arch from SD

#3 2008-04-09 22:37:58

Re: Booting Arch from SD

#4 2008-04-10 08:35:24

Re: Booting Arch from SD

#5 2008-04-10 11:48:49

Re: Booting Arch from SD

#6 2008-04-10 11:51:18

Re: Booting Arch from SD

#7 2008-04-10 20:14:36

Re: Booting Arch from SD

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