Re: [gentoo-user] Re: WAS [.. min install isos] gentoo vm guest not booting

[Mark Knecht <markknecht@gmail.com>]

On Sun, Jun 26, 2011 at 11:34 AM, Harry Putnam <reader@newsguy.com> wrote:
<SNIP>
>
> First, thanks for going well beyond the call of duty and showing the
> patience of Job.
>

Gawd, you must not know about all the public help I've received here
over the years? It's the LEAST I can do.

> Those files are there already and have been all along.
>
> But anyway I rm'ed them and followed the steps resulting in:
>
> (From chrooted shell)
>
> root@sysresccd /dev % ls -l console null
> crw-rw---- 1 root root 5, 1 Jun 26 17:33 console
> crw-rw---- 1 root root 1, 3 Jun 26 17:33 null
>
> rc-update |grep udev
>     udev |                                        sysinit
> udev-postmount | default
>
> -------        ---------       ---=---       ---------      --------
>

OK, so that's good.


I'm very curious - did you happen to try appending something like

init=/sbin/init 1

to the boot kernel command and seeing what happens? That might be
instructive about where it's really getting to or what is stopping it
from proceeding.


> You may not have noticed that 2.6.38-r3 where your config came from is
> no longer available in portage... I used -r4 first time but now
> redoing it all I'm using your config but on 2.6.39-r1.  Since I can't
> get the exact one you used I may as well get the latest.
>

OK, you caught me. I've now updated to 2.6.39-gentoo-r2:

mark@GentooVBVM ~ $ uname -a
Linux GentooVBVM 2.6.39-gentoo-r2 #1 SMP PREEMPT Sun Jun 26 12:22:10
PDT 2011 x86_64 Intel(R) Core(TM) i7 CPU X 980 @ 3.33GHz GenuineIntel
GNU/Linux
mark@GentooVBVM ~ $

> So to summarize... I've used a version I bastardized, of your config, on
> a different kernel version... maybe not the smartest way to go...
>

To do the update I took the config I sent you, accepted all the
changes with the defaults, and built the kernel. No problem here. (I'm
actually writing this from within the VM itself using Firefox.

> I've recreated /dev/console and /dev/null using the steps you quoted.
>
> I notice on a reboot of the install media and chrooting into gentoo,
> that /dev/console now has 600 permissions even though I gave it 660.
> And /dev/null now has 666 although I gave it 660.
>
>  cd /dev
>
>  ls -l console null
>  crw------- 1 root root 5, 1 Jun 26 13:02 console
>  crw-rw-rw- 1 root root 1, 3 Jun 26 13:02 null
>

As Neil noted, the instructions for fixing this stated not to mount
/dev before chrooting into the Gentoo build. You probably did that
correctly, but it's important as you moight be seeing something
provided by the boot environment and not something you really created.

<SNIP>
>
> Boot still hangs up at `Switching to clocklsource tsc
>

When we had this problem I did some reading, as I'm sure you have
also. Don't get overly fixated on that message. According to a number
of threads I read the message is the proper result of a change in how
the clock is getting set up. It's spawned earlier on and the messages
print when the asynchronous process completes. Sometimes it prints
earlier, sometimes it's the last message, but in our case it wasn't
the real cause of the problem.

The real end of the process, as far as it had gone, was that the
kernel loaded, released memory and then just stopped.


<SNIP>
>
> I may fool with it a bit more... but it's pretty discouraging.

Sorry for the problems. Report back on the init=/sbin/init 1 thing.
I'm interested.

Cheers,
Mark