[arch-general] Upgrade finish in a "Kernel Panic - not syncing : no init found"

[Thomas Bächler]

Am 22.03.2013 23:00, schrieb Dany De Bontridder:
> Today,  everything works fine and I decide to keep my PC up-to-date,
> so I run pacman -Syu and I get a message when trying to boot
> 
>  *** Kernel Panic - not syncing : No init found. ***

That is actually an impossible error message. It is only printed when
 1) no initramfs or an invalid initramfs is attached
 2) the kernel manages to mount the root partition
 3) no init binary is found

If a valid initramfs (containing a valid executable /init) is attached,
then the kernel will execute that an *never* try to mount the root
partition and find /init on its own. Thus, it will not print that message.

Now let's assume that you didn't attach a valid initramfs. Since the
Arch kernel contains no hard drive support and no filesystem support
whatsoever, it is impossible for it to mount a file system and the panic
message will *always* be
 "unable to mount root filesystem on [...]"

If you did attach a valid initramfs (as Arch does by default), then the
error messages would be different and you would always get an emergency
shell if something goes wrong. Even if you ignore everything and exit
all emergency shells that pop up, you will get a different panic message:
 "attempting to kill init"

In conclusion, it is entirely impossible that you get the error message
you quoted if you use the Arch kernel.


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