Re: [Xen-devel] Re: domU kernel panic with root fs

["M.A. Williamson" <maw48@xxxxxxxxx>]

> I managed to figure out that this is related to devfs.  Whenever I have
> devfs support compiled in it panics.  This is even if I don't mount
> devfs (devfs=mount) and don't have "Automatically mount at boot time" in
> the kernel config.
>
> Anyone know why?  This is a significant nuisance if you're running a
> gentoo system.
Unfortunately it's not possible to work around this by not mounting devfs. 
The virtual block device driver and DevFS do not play nicely together :-(
I suspect that DevFS enabled kernels don't like the VBD driver trying to 
register block devices without having first registered with the IDE or SCSI 
layers. As a result, virtual block devices don't get registered and hence 
you can't boot off them. It's not an issue in dom0, since you typically 
don't have VBDs, just real devices.
The feeling was that since DevFS is being phased out of the Linux kernel in 
favour of udev, it's probably not worth the work required to support it. 
All the XenLinux drivers should play nicely with udev / sysfs. I heard 
Gentoo was moving towards using udev but I don't know how far they've gone 
in that direction.
HTH,
Mark


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