The legacy of the initramfs optimization

I was shocked receiving the Target filesystem doesn't have /sbin/init message. I've surfed the Internet for possible solutions - none of them helped. I had to remember everything I've changed in my system during past 3 months. Finally, I remembered..

I'm a Linux person. I'm a Linux person since March 2008. My current OS is Ubuntu Linux (x86). But I don't like to be "generic". My x64 processor is not generic, it's Core2. I have one particular Ethernet, wi-fi and bluetooth adapter, one sound and video card. I'll never use the 95% of Linux-supported hardware..

So, I've compiled my custom "sony-vaio" kernel, still always downloaded the generic kernel upgrades (to have a native kernel full of modules in a case of emergency).

This happened when I've updated the system.

Ubuntu has downloaded the linux-image-2.6.11-generic kernel. I wanted to check, If my motioneye camera works under it, so, I rebooted the computer and selected the Ubuntu 8.10, kernel 2.6.27-11-generic option. Bump!

Target filesystem doesn't have /sbin/init

I had no ideas of what did that mean. I rebooted the laptop via Ctrl+Alt+PrintScreen+B. Fortunately my custom kernel was working fine. After an hour of surfing the Internet I already knew, that possibly the kernel can't mount a root file system. So, the difference was between my custom kernel and the generic kernel. I was annoyed. There was nothing in my kernel, that generic kernel didn't have. But wait! While creating my custom kernel, I've compiled the ext3 filesystem support statically into it. But why the generic kernel can't load the ext3 module?

Suddenly it dawned upon me.

There is initial ram disk stuff at the beginning of system load process.

The initial ramdisk, or initrd is a temporary file system commonly used by the Linux kernel during boot. The initrd is typically used for making preparations before the real root file system can be mounted [1]

So, possibly the initrd image created for the generic kernel didn't contain the ext3 module. How could that happen? It could, if you're a person who likes to optimize everything that could be optimized. For example, the system's boot-time.

There is a minimal set of modules enough to load a system both from hibernate (suspend2disk) and powered-off conditions. By default, the initrd contains "most" modules (see /etc/initramfs-tools/initramfs.conf file). In my case the MODULES option was changed like this:

1
2

#MODULES=most
MODULES=list

I used next steps to generate the modules list:

1. Boot kernel with init=/bin/sh option
2. Execute sudo lsmod | tail -n +2 | sort | awk '{print $1;}' > /etc/initramfs-tools/modules
3. Execute update-initramfs -v -d -k \`uname -r` && update-initramfs -v -c -k \`uname -r`

The second line copies all loaded modules' names to /etc/initramfs-tools/modules file. The third line updates the current kernel's initramfs file.

As you might already found out, there was no ext3 module in the list, because my custom kernel didn't need an ext3 module!

But Ubuntu's generic kernel has the ext3 as a module! So, to boot a system with generic kernel, I should have had an "ext3" line in /etc/initramfs-tools/modules.

It didn't take long. I updated the file and called update-initramfs -c -k all to regenerate the init ram disks for both kernels (actually I didn't need to do that for my custom kernel :).

At last, I could load the system with new 2.6.27.11 kernel.