Those of you who want to check out the new 2.6.4 kernel available, which can be run even if the host is on 2.4

You shoud make the dir /sys

It is used to store some of the things that used to be in /proc under 2.4

Adam

Some distros, like Debian (unstable), already know about kernel 2.6 and will mount sysfs automagically in its init scripts. But depending on your distro, you may want to add this line to /etc/fstab:

sysfs   /sys   sysfs   defaults   0   0

I tried switching to 2.6.4, and it didn't go very well. In fact, the machine hanged and I had to revert to 2.4.25.

In its dying moments my lish console had the following to say:

NET: Registered protocol family 1
NET: Registered protocol family 10
IPv6 over IPv4 tunneling driver
ip6_tables: (C) 2000-2002 Netfilter core team
NET: Registered protocol family 17
NET: Registered protocol family 15
802.1Q VLAN Support v1.8 Ben Greear <greearb@candelatech.com>
All bugs added by David S. Miller <davem@redhat.com>
Initializing software serial port version 1
Using anticipatory io scheduler
 /dev/ubd/disc0: unknown partition table
 /dev/ubd/disc1: unknown partition table
Initializing stdio console driver
md: Autodetecting RAID arrays.
md: autorun ...
md: ... autorun DONE.
kjournald starting.  Commit interval 5 seconds
EXT3-fs: mounted filesystem with ordered data mode.
VFS: Mounted root (ext3 filesystem) readonly.
INIT: version 2.85 booting
INIT: Entering runlevel: 2
INIT: Id "0" respawning too fast: disabled for 5 minutes
INIT: no more processes left in this runlevel

The two lines that read "unknown partition table" are particularly suspect. Has anyone tried 2.6.4 and got the same results?

2.6.4 worked fine with my Fedora distro. Didn't even have to add /sys to the fstab file nor any other changes were needed to get it working.

Additionally, you need to have udev and module-init-tools installed. These two items are usually not shipped distributions by default. (Newer ones will have it.)

Bill Clinton

This is wrong. You don't need udev or module-init-tools (especially since modules are disabled).

I'm working on a "guide" to help transition to 2.6

-Chris

I'm using a fresh Debian/stable installation and couldn't get it to boot with the 2.6 kernel, even after I added the above line to fstab (thanks for the info! ). I couldn't SSH into the box because DHCP had died saying "Unrecognized kernel version".

Google-happy, I found this great post - http://lists.backports.org/pipermail/backports/2003-December/000048.html - and upgraded my DHCP client to v3 by booting with the 2.4 kernel. This fixed the problem and I now have Woody with the 2.6 kernel - and it's fast!

The link given above seems to have rotted. Googling found me another link that said to edit /sbin/dhclient and alter the regex that matches the kernel version to match 2.6 by adding the "6" shown here:

2.[123456].*)

Also, caker pointed out that you should

apt-get install dhcp3-client

to fix in the correct manner (once you have your network back).

Background, to help others searching for an answer:

The migration to a new host upgraded my debian small distro's kernel to latest 2.6 (2.6.21.1), and the network did not come up.

Doing a `ifdown eth0; ifup eth0` yielded an "Unrecognized kernel version" error.

I did the above edit and `ifup eth0` no longer complains. Haven't yet rebooted to be 100% sure.

- Barrie

_________________
http://slaysys.com/

Since we've revived this old thread, and there may be a few others who hit this, here's the deal:

Very old Debian deployments (two or three years old) need to "apt-get install dhcp3-client". I'm pretty sure if you've ever ran apt-get update, apt-get upgrade in the past few years you would have pulled this in already.

-Chris