After a fresh potato install I upgraded to woody with a 2.4.18 kernel. Everything works, but booting takes a while. During reboot the calculation of the module dependencies alone takes about 1 minute. Also the following 3 messages are repeated a couple of times:

insmod: NOTE: /etc/modules.conf is more recent than /lib/modules/2.4.18-1-386/modules.dep

Depmod: ** unresolved symbol in binfmt_aout.o

/etc/mtab: No such file or directory

I guess these messages indicate the cause for the slow boot. Now my question is, off course, how to get rid of these problems.

Gilion

The time used to dependency resolving can be redused quite a lot by compiling a kernel that contains only support for your hardware.

To compile a kernel in debian, you need to (replace XX with your favorite version)

and read the /usr/share/doc/kernel-package/README.gz

For the unresolved symbols: get rid ot the aout-format support.

in case of /etc/mtab, updating of mount-package might help.
Or you can try to make /etc/mtab to be a symlink to /proc/mounts.

there are 2 problems here....
1. the "etc/modules.conf is more recent than /lib/modules/2.4.18-1-386/modules.dep" section indicates you will have to do a
first variant is to be used if you have manually modified the /etc/modules file.
second is if you didn't, or you made modifications through /etc/modutils/* files (the right way in debian)



2.maybe you have read-only permisions on your /etc/mtab file or you don't have it at all.
variant 1: variant 2:
good luck.

And tell us if you solved the problem.... or not

I read somewhere that compiling kernels on i486 with 8Mb RAM can take hours, so I don't like that solution. Compiling kernels at each hardware change would cost a lot of time.

Can you be more specific about the aout format. What is it and where can I find info on how to remove it? Stuff like that.

For /etc/mtab reinstalling the mount package and chmod-ing the file didn't change anything. /etc/mtab seems to be generated over and over during reboot, changing permision again.

Also update-modules.modutils does not exist. Update-modules does exist, but doesn't change the booting error. When I change i.e. /etc/modutils/ne and run update-modules these changes appear in modules.conf like I intended.

Something which crossed my minds, should I worry about these messages?

Gilion

Well,

I wouldn't stress too much about those messages.
There was a discussion at the debian-user list few years ago about the subject. Seems like nobody nows exactly what is wrong in the module handling.

The aout-stuff was somewhat fixing the sympons than the real probmem. Meaning that if you remove (move away, so you can return it back if you find you need it) the binfmt_aout.o module from /lib/modules/kernversion/ somewhere, then it can't complain about it having some strange symbols to be resolved.

The 1 minute dependency checkking is the price to be paid from the dynamic kernel.