I have a Fedora Core 1 system running 2.4.22-1.2115.nptl, and I wanted to load a 2.6 kernel onto it and use that instead. So I went and downloaded 2.6.7-1.469, installed it and restarted the system. The 2.6 kernel booted up fine, but once it reached the following line:

Freeing unused kernel memory: 136k

It stopped. The kernel was fully responsive - both Ctrl+Alt+Del and Alt+SysRQ generated responses, but init was never started. I tried with init=/bin/bash2 specified on the commandline - no go. I even went and downloaded kernel 2.6.6-1.436 and tried that instead, and still no go.

Has anybody ever experienced this? I can supply additional information if desired.

Just boot again with your old kernel and disable the kudzu service (hardware recognition on boot) and you should solve your problem

I'll try that. But how could kudzu interfere with the kernel's ability to run /sbin/init?