kernel upgrade woes

[Hugo_vdS]

I haven't upgraded my kernel in rather a long time, and the distribution (fc6) is EOL'd, so I've been trying to compile a new one. I started with latest stable (2.6.32.3), built and installed it, but booting failed, so I stepped back to 2.6.22.19 as my best guess at the optimal near-match to my current 2.6.22.14-72.fc6.

I used oldconfig with my current config, then:

make V=1 bzImage
make V=1 modules
sudo make V=1 modules_install
sudo cp arch/i386/boot/bzImage /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.22.19
sudo cp System.map /boot/System.map-2.6.22.19
sudo /sbin/mkinitrd -f -v /boot/initrd-2.6.22.19.img 2.6.22.19
# add to grub.conf:
title Handrolled (2.6.22.19)
        root (hd0,0)
        kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.22.19 ro root=LABEL=/
        initrd /boot/initrd-2.6.22.19.img

When booting with this, I get:

Loading ata_piix.ko module
ata_piix 0000:00:1f.2: MAP [ P0 P2 IDE IDE ]
ACPI: PCI Interrupt 0000:00:1f.2[b] -> GSI 19 (level, low) -> IRQ 19
ata_piix 0000:00:1f.2: 0x1F0 IDE port busy
ata_piix 0000:00:1f.2: 0x170 IDE port busy
ata_piix 0000:00:1f.2: no available legacy port
Trying to resume from LABEL=SWAP-sda2
No suspend signature on swap, not resuming.
Creating root device.
Mounting root filesystem.
ext3: No journal on filesystem on hdd5
mount: error mounting /dev/root on /sysroot as ext3: Invalid argument
Setting up other filesystems
Setting up new root fs
setuproot: moving /dev failed: No such file or directory
no fstab.sys, mounting internal defaults
setuproot: error mounting /proc: No such file or directory
setuproot: error mounting /sys: No such file or directory
Switching to new root and running init.
unmounting old /dev
unmounting old /proc
unmounting old /sys
switchroot: mount failed: No such file or directory
Kernel panic - not syncing: Attempted to kill init!

I'm not sure the ext3 message is relevant - hdd5 is an old disk usually mounted readonly as /old, the boot disk is sda.

Any suggestions of what to try next, or how to go about diagnosing the problem? I've scanned the config diffs (attached), and can't see an obvious culprit - they are all removals of presumably obsolete variables; I've also checked that the initrd contains the same entries as my current one, and the init script is identical.

Hugo

[coopstah13]

you'd probably spend less time installing and configuring the latest fedora than you would trying to get a new kernel to work on an old distro

[Hugo_vdS]

Got this working, finally, thanks to some great help from Greg at my old office.

Not sure exactly why, but with the new build the IDE driver gets to see the SATA disk before the SATA driver does: I should have searched for the first thing that looked like an error message ("no available legacy port") to find answers more quickly.

The solution is to tell the IDE driver not to attempt to detect drives on the first controller, by adding "ide0=noprobe" to the kernel command line.

That doesn't yet solve things for the 2.6.32.3 build, but now I have a reproducible baseline at 2.6.22.19 I should be able to take it forward.

Hugo