User-Mode Linux

darkmage · 08-04-2002, 03:27 PM

I already have Gentoo and Slack installed on my hard drive. I saw this thing called user-mode linux which lets you run another distro or many other cool things (check it out if you haven't seen it before). You need a root_fs to boot, so I downloaded a debian woody tar.bz2 which I unzipped and gave me Debian_3.0.ext2. Now what??? I tried to start uml with linux, but it gives me a kernel panic because there's no root_fs. I tried root=path/to/Debian_3.0.ext2 and that didn't work either. I'd really like to get this to work!!

Thymox · 08-05-2002, 05:47 PM

IIRC, UserMode Linux is not a distro as such. The readmes (this is from memory, BTW) say that you should compile the kernel with UML, to create a UML-kernel (I think you need to patch the kernel tree with some uml stuff), and you can then run this uml-kernel as a normal user process. So, effectively, you'd have a linux 'system' running as a process under Linux. I believe it's most beneficial for testing new kernel 'drivers' on a system that doesn't have the hardware. I could be wrong, though.

HTH

darkmage · 08-05-2002, 06:08 PM

I've compiled the kernel and all, but you need a distro file to actually boot the kernel. That's what I couldn't get.