I would err on the side of reporting it. At least the error should point out what it's tripping over. Mounting _over_ root is a legitimate case base mounting a swap slice to anything is a corner case that should be noted or at least the error can die and state 'OMGWTFBBQ you can't mount a swap slice, I smell a fat finger!' -- Sean (mobile) On 2011-07-07, at 10:06 PM, "Adam Thompson" <athompso@athompso.net> wrote:

CentOS 5.6 system. Running happily. Applied kernel update, reboot, PANIC - unable to mount root filesystem. (Along with other various weird error messages.) Spent a lot of time deconstructing initrd(4)s.

Final root cause of the problem: in fstab(5), I had manually added a swap partition.

"mount -a" didn't care, but mkinitrd sure did: I had fstab like this: /dev/sda1 / ext3 defaults 1 1 /dev/sdb1 / swap defaults 0 0

Mkinitrd(8) was tripping over the "/" in field #2 of the swap record, and generating a non-functional /init script in the initrd. Changing the second line to read "/dev/sdb1 swap swap defaults 0 0" fixed the problem.

Aside from documenting this for the edification of others, what's the consensus: is this a bug in mkinitrd(8) that should be reported? (i.e. it should do more sanity checks?)

-Adam Thompson athompso@athompso.net

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