ext3 and 2.4.18 kernel rebuild
 

I've done a search of a few places around the net, including this board, and seem to be seeing quite a few people who've got problems booting with a 2.4.18 kernel, if they're running with ext3 as their root file system type.

I am also suffering this issue - and wondered if there'd been any progress on working out why there is a problem.

My personal set up is as follows :
PIII 733Mhz
512MB
/dev/hda = 20 GB IBM Thingy with Win2K on it
/dev/hdb = 60 GB IBM Thingy with Mandrake 8.1 on it

I've been trying to upgrade the kernel on this for a while now -and I keep hitting the same snag - once the kernel is built and (I assume) correctly installed - the machine will not boot with it - since it complains it cannot mount the root file system.

Now I've been compiling and installing kernels on linux systems for years now - so I know the basics - but this is doing my head in. I've made sure I've built in support for BOTH ext3 and ext2 (since an ext3 drive should mount as ext2 with the journaling option not enabled). The root=/dev/hdb1 option is there in black and white (or whatever colours you have Vim displaying :) ) in the lilo.conf - so this hasn't changed.

The *only* hint I've had of someone else with a similar problem is on the kernel mailing lists - with some fella apparently having to explicitly compile support for his IDE controller into the new kernel - which he most definitely didn't have to do before. I'm worried though that this doesn't apply to me - since I think his was an Off-board IDE controller - and I don't have such a beast - I'm just using the one on the motherboard (It's a Dell Dimension 4100 - I've no idea what the 'board is though).

Does *anyone* have any ideas on this - it's driving me loopy!

Bry

Well - thanks for all the replies on this one ;)

I worked it out on my own last night.

ext3 was a complete Red Herring, and it had nothing to do with that... I'd managed to somehow compile all the IDE controller options as modules!

I rebuilt again last night - and made sure I'd added the stock PCI IDE controller to the kernel - and presto! It boots....

Now I've got to figure out a nice clean way to get X to start nicely when I switch between kernels - since the Nvidia driver is kernel version specific <sigh>

Oh yeah - and I have to rebuild iptables too...

But I'm moving again - which is good!

Bry

If you download the nvidia kernel and glx files as .tar.gz then you can build them against a new kernel in about 30 seconds.

....or as src.rpms - which I've done

No - the issue here is that while I'm still swapping between the two kernels - the old and the new - runlevel 5 only works on whichever one the nv driver has been compiled for....

So if I need to go back to the old one, but I've recompiled the nv driver for the new one - I have to sit there for 3 minutes until XINIT decides it's going to give up trying to launch XDM (because the X server is refusing to start) then log in as root, and quickly change run level to 3.

Then - I can if I want to recompile the nv driver again - or I can edit my XConfig-4 file and go back to the old nv driver, rather than the pukka Nvidia driver.

I'm thinking of trying to add something into rc.local which runs uname - works out which version of the kernel I've got, and does a file swap between two versions of the XConfig-4 file... I just haven't got round to doing it yet.

And the reason I'm still swapping between the two is that I appear to have not taken into account the effects switching to a new kernel version has on iptables - it won't work until that's been recompiled against the new kernel source too - and I'm buggered if I'm surfing the net without an iptables firewall there to protect me....

Phew.

Bry