I want to emulate Slackware installation over a serial console using kvm/qemu.
I did a similar installation with Debian Lenny, and was able to make that work by copying the vmlinuz and initrd.gz from the installation iso to a directory on the host, then starting the installation using qemu -nographic -kernel vmlinuz -initrd initrd.gz -append console=ttyS0. I'm not sure if that's really the best way but it worked..
I tried to do the same for Slack so I copied /kernels/hugesmp.s/bzImage to a directory on the host and booted with qemu -nographic -kernel bzImage -append console=ttyS0. Console output redirection works fine, but the kernel panics:
Code:
VFS: Cannot open root device "<NULL>" or unknown-block(8,2)
Please append a correct "root=" boot option; here are the available partitions:
0300 5242880 hda driver: ide-disk
1600 3838730 hdc driver: ide-cdrom
Kernel panic - not syncing: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on unknown-block(8,2)
There is no root fs to mount yet, hda is an empty qemu image.. how do I make this work? Am I even using the right boot kernel?