Kernel panic: Attempted to kill init!

[Cef]

On Tue, 29 Mar 2005 11:07, Peter Garrett wrote:
> On Tue, 2005-03-29 at 10:46 +1000, Cef wrote:
> > A quick coverage of the boot process, which may help you to diagnose the
> > problem:
> >
> > At boot, the bootloader loads the kernel and the initrd.img into memory.
> > The initrd.img is a small root filesystem (with kernel modules and
> > scripts/programs) that is used to get the system running. The bootloader
> > then runs the kernel, and points it at the initrd.img in memory. The
> > kernel mounts this image as filesystem, and runs the init scripts on the
> > initrd, which in turn loads any modules that are required to access the
> > real rootfs. Once this is done, the real rootfs is mounted, and then the
> > kernel is told to 'pivot_root', which changes the root mount point to the
> > new root filesystem. The system then loads the real init processes and
> > then goes through all it's usual startup processes.
>
> Stuart - this is an excellent, clear explanation of initrd and the boot
> process : I've never really understood "initrd", "pivot-root" and the
> rest of the terminology. Thanks.

Welcome.

> Have you considered writing some explanations of this kind for the wiki ?

I have, mainly while I was writing it for the email. *grin*

> Or perhaps you have already ? 

Not yet, so consider the above a "first draft". I'll hopefully get to it soon. 
I would really like to flesh it out a bit more as it glosses over one or two 
somewhat important details that can make or break debugging a problem.

-- 
 Stuart Young - aka Cefiar - cef at optus.net