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Tasklist

FS#5468 - /boot not mounted while updating to kernel 2.6.18

Attached to Project: Arch Linux
Opened by Glyn Adgie (glyn) - Friday, 29 September 2006, 08:07 GMT
Task Type Bug Report
Category System
Status Closed
Assigned To No-one
Architecture not specified
Severity High
Priority Normal
Reported Version 0.7.2 Gimmick
Due in Version Undecided
Due Date Undecided
Percent Complete 100%
Votes 0
Private No

Details

I recently updated six machines with pacman -Syu, including the 2.6.18 kernel. After rebooting, three machines booted off the previous kernel, e.g. 2.6.17, instead of the new one, which meant that the appropriate modules were not available. This was confirmed using uname -a. The kernel update had installed the 2.6.18 modules, and removed the previous modules.

All machines have a separate boot partition, using ext2 or ext3 filesystem. Booting is done with grub. Here is a typical menu.lst entry:

title Linux-2.6.18-md1
root (hd0,0)
kernel /vmlinuz26 root=/dev/md1 md=1,hda7,hdc7 ro
initrd /kernel26.img

Usually, only the title needs to be changed, and this was the case on all machines. We have been using mkinitcpio over a few updates with no problems.

A further investigation showed that /boot could not have been mounted when the kernel was updated, so the kernel files were installed on the root partition or raid, not on the boot partition. This was confirmed by unmounting /boot on all machines, and looking at the files in /boot. On affected machines, I could see the latest kernel image and associated files. Unfortunately, I did not check what was mounted before updating. However, /boot was automatically mounted on all machines after I had fixed the kernel problem and rebooted. I did not need to make any alterations to fstab.

Sorry for the duplicates in AUR. Can these be removed?
This task depends upon

Closed by  Woody Gilk (Shadowhand)
Tuesday, 10 October 2006, 04:32 GMT
Reason for closing:  Not a bug
Additional comments about closing:  Closing, this is user error.
Comment by Jan de Groot (JGC) - Friday, 29 September 2006, 09:52 GMT
My guess is that somehow you unmounted /boot yourself and installed the kernel on the root partition a long while after that. Many people unmount their /boot or make it readonly to increase security problems, could be in your case?
Comment by Glyn Adgie (glyn) - Friday, 29 September 2006, 14:45 GMT
All the machines mount /boot automatically, from an fstab entry. The only problem I have had with partitions not being mounted at boot was in the transition from devfs to udev device naming. If I had old devfs device names in fstab after an upgrade to udev, I saw errors on startup, and I have seen nothing like that recently. All machines made the transition to udev some time ago, and have had many kernel updates since then.

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