Datasheet

“main” (Installation and Administration) — 2004/6/25 — 13:29 — page 255 — #281
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10
Special Features of SUSE LINUX
10.3.5 Possible Difficulties — Custom Kernels
A custom kernel can often lead to the following problem: out of habit, the
SCSI driver is hard-linked to the kernel, but the existing initrd remains
unchanged. When you boot, the following occurs: The kernel already con-
tains the SCSI driver, so the hardware is detected. initrd, however, now
tries to load the driver as a module. With some SCSI drivers, especially
with aic7xxx, this leads to the system locking. Strictly speaking, this is a
kernel error. An already existing driver should not be allowed to be loaded
again as a module. The problem is already known from another context,
however (serial drivers).
There are several solutions to the problem. Configure the driver as a
module (then it will be correctly loaded in the initrd. Alternatively,
remove the entry for initrd from the file /etc/grub/menu.lst or
/etc/lilo.conf, depending on your boot loader. An equivalent to
the latter solution is to remove the variable INITRD_MODULES then run
mkinitrd, which then realizes that no initrd is needed.
10.3.6 Prospects
It is quite possible in the future that an initrd will be used for many more
and much more sophisticated things than loading modules needed to ac-
cess /.
Root file system on software RAID (linuxrc sets up the md devices)
Root file system on LVM
Root file system is encrypted (linuxrc queries the password)
Root file system on a SCSI hard disk on a PCMCIA adapter
For more information, see /usr/src/linux/Documentation/
ramdisk.txt, /usr/src/linux/Documentation/initrd.txt, and
the man page for initrd.
10.4 The SUSE Rescue System
SUSE LINUX contains a rescue system for accessing your Linux partitions
from the outside in the event of an emergency. The rescue system can be
255SUSE LINUX Enterprise Server