Bug#343042: [Yaird-devel] Bug#343042: #343042: linux-image-2.6.14-2-686: Boot aborts with message '/bin/cat

[Jonas Smedegaard]

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On Mon, 12 Dec 2005 16:24:26 +0000
Richard Antony Burton <richardaburton at hotmail.com> wrote:

> Considering the potential for harm I wonder if there could be
> something done to mitigate this happening again in future. Avoiding
> releasing yaird at the same time as a minor kernel update would have
> helped, because the bug would have only been hit by a small number
> before it could be fixed. However perhaps the more important issue is
> that of releasing minor kernel updates that overwrite the existing
> kernel, this is obviously vunerable to more problems than just a
> badly timed yaird break. That's obviously an issue for the kernel
> maintainers.

One appreach that you could do locally is to copy your /boot/initrd.*
to /boot/initrd.*.good or whatever. Then if problems occur (and you are
using GRUB) you can edit the GRUB menu item to load the alternative
image.

Such approach is tightly related to the capabilities of your
bootloader, while the ramdisk image is generated from your kernel
package postinst. Enhancing this for the distribution (rather than
each admin doing local hacks depending on their choice of bootloader
+kernel+arch) probably requires something like
http://wiki.debian.org/FlexibleKernelHandling


> p.s. before anyone tells me, i have been reminded of why it's a good
> idea to keep a known working kernel on the box ;-)

Ahh - too late I guess (or look the other way when those other two
replies of mine hits your inbox) :-P


 - Jonas

- -- 
* Jonas Smedegaard - idealist og Internet-arkitekt
* Tlf.: +45 40843136  Website: http://dr.jones.dk/

 - Enden er nær: http://www.shibumi.org/eoti.htm
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