has something changed qemu side that would effect running mkinitrd on a new kernel on a vps?
background: I updated kernel in my vps (slackware 14.2), did same process as last time I updated it, installed packages, ran mkinitrd, ran lilo, rebooted, only now I'm getting a panic with issues about "no root device". It seems qemu is not passing something to my vps the same as it did 4-5 months ago
perhaps virtio has been enabled for your vps?
i'm not sure, but my simple mkinitrd command which worked last time isn't working now
slackware contains a script which makes a initrd for you as well which spits out a different command (but which also will not boot)
mkinitrd -c -k 4.4.88 -f ext4 -r /dev/sda1 -m virtio:virtio_ring:virtio_scsi:virtio_pci:virtio_balloon:virtio_blk:virtio_net:jbd2:mbcache:ext4 -u -o /boot/initrd.gz
all the virtio info was not there last time I updated
I feel /dev/sda is not my root any longer
maybe qemu is messing with lilo
I dunno, maybe the wrong place to ask here, but something is off
it seems relevant for this place :)
I have to go to work, so I'll be afk for about 9 hrs but if anyone has any info that may be helpful for me, please leave me a /msg, and thank you in advance
r0ni: try /dev/vda1 as root?
dne: I will try later, it could just be that I'm an idiot and doing it wrong, or slackware team messed up their kernel update, but I don't see any error on my part so far
YER AN IDIOT r0ni
That's not very nice, BryceBot
If you'd done a simple "reboot" then any qemu configuration changes would not have been effected -- those only happen with a full stop and start (of the qemu process / your VPS).
Having said that, yes /dev/vda is how virtio disks enumerate under Linux, so that would be something to try.
I think it's more likely that when you updated Slackware/the kernel, the driver responsible for handling and enumerating your disk changed from presenting it as sda to presenting it as vda.
(And much less likely that ARP would have made changes to your VPS' configuration without notifying you, or working with you. They've always been real good about that with me.)
A quick Googling suggests this may be a well-known issue with Slackware https://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/slackware-14/slackware-14-2-x86_64-with-qemu-kvm-virtio-failing-to-boot-4175591800/
And, now that I've been genuinely helpful, I'm free to make the "Whoa, people are still using Slackware" remark :)
i never understood why the inconsistency of sda vs vda
that problem happened many many years ago with some non slackware distro
oh with xen, i think.
but if using the same virtual IO driver changing device name sounds like it's asking for problems
next eth0 will become net0
didn't that already happen, or even worse :)
hrm, more things to look into, thank you for the suggestions brycec!
and I do have a debian system around but meh, slackware is what i've been accustomed to for half a century now so..
quarter century...
thought about that for a minute, didn't sound right ha
:) it was the first one I used also, back in 1993
it's kind of crazy that linux is a quarter century old now..
Slackware was also my first linux. I remember installing it from a vast pile of floppies onto a 486 laptop in about 1994. I never did get X to work on it
Mine too!
Because I could download it on my dial up modem.
Yep. I would have downloaded it via dialup on Windows 3.1 (maybe 3.11) and written it to floppies
1994 would probably have been a 14.4k modem
Which would apparently have taken 13 minutes for each 1.44MB floppy image and google tells me that the first slackware was 13 floppies for the main distro, with another 11 if you wanted to add X
So that's nearly 3 hours of downloading (over 5 hours if you wanted X too). I'm surprised I bothered!
plett there were less things to get distracted by
i hated the idea of having lots of floppies ...
but i still installed os/2 from floppies once..
which would have been more than 13 floppies
although that was read-only, rather than write, then read...
debian was my first real linux.  pre apt-get.
i found it rather slow and cumbersome.  and wondered why it was so complicated and broken.
apt-get did make things a lot nicer.  dselect was awkward to use.
but yeah downloading huge packages because of one minor change on dialup was rather irritating.