Kernel 3.1.6 - watch out for "Unable to mount root fs" panic

While testing kernel 3.1.6 for bug #396469 I got the common kernel panic "not syncing: VFS: Unable to mount root fs".

It's easy to fix, here's the grub config before:


title Gentoo Linux
root (hd0,0)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-3.1.6-gentoo

And fixed one:


title Gentoo Linux
root (hd0,0)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-3.1.6-gentoo root=/dev/sda1

I had to pass an explicit root= parameter. How to figure it out? mount -l or cat /proc/mounts are not so helpful:


rootfs on / type rootfs (rw)
/dev/root on / type ext3 (rw,noatime,errors=continue,barrier=1,data=writeback)

So I used "fdisk -l" just to make sure whether it's sda or something else...

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System

/dev/sda1              63    59006744    29503341   83  Linux

/dev/sda2        59006745    62910539     1951897+  82  Linux swap / Solaris

How to batch-stabilize big things like KDE 4.7.4

I've just finished stabilizing KDE 4.7.4 on x86, and it was about 300 packages, so it would be very hard to do without good tools. I have some pretty nice scripts, so it took me maybe a few supervision and everything has been done automatically (even then it can take 3-4 hours, so trying to do that manually would be a huge waste of time and take even longer).

Here's how I did that. First I created a ~/kde-stable.txt file with the following contents:


# bug #396359
=app-misc/strigi-0.7.7
=app-office/akonadi-server-1.6.2-r1
=dev-libs/shared-desktop-ontologies-0.8.1
=kde-base/activitymanager-4.7.4
=kde-base/akonadiconsole-4.7.4
=kde-base/akregator-4.7.4

... hundreds of packages omitted ...

And then:

~/arch-tools/batch-stabilize.py --arch x86 -i kde-stable.txt --repo ~/gentoo-x86/

You can do that too! Just clone my arch-tools repo, hosted by the Gentoo Overlays Team.

The tool creates a file batch-stabilize.log in the current directory (if it exists, new entries are appended to it), and the file contains all executed commands, their exit codes and output, so you can figure out what happened if something goes wrong.

It's also easy to create a list of packages in format accepted by batch-stabilize.py from the bug list. The bugzilla viewer is interactive, ncurses-based, and is simple to run:

~/arch-tools/bugzilla-viewer.py --arch x86 --repo ~/gentoo-x86/ --verbose

It's OK to omit --repo and --verbose parameters - it'll run faster and do less checks. You can also append --security parameter to only review security bugs.

I hope you like that, and enjoy either the tools, or they results - more up to date Gentoo!