Booting ancient kernels on Ubuntu 9.10

[Andy Whitcroft]

On Fri, Jan 15, 2010 at 10:54:57AM -0800, Luis R. Rodriguez wrote:
> On Fri, Jan 15, 2010 at 10:50 AM, Luis R. Rodriguez <mcgrof at gmail.com> wrote:
> > On Fri, Jan 15, 2010 at 10:28 AM, Luis R. Rodriguez <mcgrof at gmail.com> wrote:
> >> Curious if other developers have tried to boot ancient kernels on
> >> Ubuntu 9.10. I've had issues, seems init fails while trying to mount
> >> the root filesystem but I'm not yet sure why that is. I tried 2.6.23
> >> and 2.6.24 but no luck. I have the other kernels, will see at which
> >> one it started to fail, but curious if others have tried.
> >
> > I've tested 2.6.23 all the way up and the last working kernel is
> > 2.6.27. Here's a picture of 2.6.25 boot failure, but its the same on
> > 2.6.26:
> >
> > http://bombadil.infradead.org/~mcgrof/images/2010/boot-9.10-on-2.6.25.jpg
> >
> > I'm using stock kernel builds for >= 2.6.27 as that is when Ubuntu
> > started producing mainline kernels, I've built the others which makes
> > me suspect I misconfigured them. Here's my config on 2.6.26, for
> > example:
> >
> > http://bombadil.infradead.org/~mcgrof/configs/2010/config-2.6.26.8-fail-on-9.10.txt
> >
> > Not sure what it could be.
> 
> Does upstart 0.6.3-11 depend on stuff only in newer kernels?

It may be starting to depend on the devtmpfs thingy which pre-populates
the /dev.  Thats really expensive time wise during boot if done from
udev.

-apw