Bug 72741 – devfs installation for ppc apparently broken

• Product: Gentoo Linux
• Status: RESOLVED FIXED

[Description Rod Furey 2004-11-28 09:12:00 UTC]

I've got a R1.4 system on my iMac 400MHz, 64Mb, tons of disk space etc. It works but is slightly old. On upgrading the system this sort of error comes up:

The superblock could not be read or does not describe a correct ext2
filesystem. If the device is valid and it really contains an ext2 filesystem (and not swap or ufs or something else), then the superblock is corrupt and you might try running e2fsck with an alternate superblock

* Filesystem couldn't be fixed :(

Give root password for maintenance
(or type Control-D for normal startup):

I've tried this with ext2, ext3 and reiserfs filesystems.

Meanwhile, over on the Installing Gentoo forum, someone else has the exact same problem (info above lifted from the originating post). (See thread Can't boot new gentoo install on a ppc (pismo laptop)[HELP!])

After some discussion and playing around and help we've come to the conclusion that devfs is broken somehow. emerging udev and using that allows the system to proceed past this point. (It breaks because of other errors but that's another problem report).

Note that I also tried the upgrade method from the 1.4 system - same results.

Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
1. Install from Universal CD.
2. When rebooting system for the first time, above error occurs.
3.



I realise that devfs is deprecated and that udev gets me around the problem.
However the install CD is not well at the moment - it gives other problems which
I'm working my way around. However this one is clear and so I've reported it.
Anyone trying to install Gentoo for the first time isn't going to be impressed
(I've spent ages (weeks) on this).

[Comment 1 Rod Furey 2004-11-28 09:35:16 UTC]

Forgot to mention - it downloads things like devfs from the internet - it's not a locally cached version.

[Comment 2 SpanKY 2004-11-30 13:37:41 UTC]

there isnt enough info here to track down the problem ...

you neglected to provide `emerge info` for one

[Comment 3 Luca Barbato 2004-12-02 03:08:36 UTC]

A friend of mine phoned me yesterday about the same issues about devfs on a fresh installation. I'll try to get some more info from him, in the mean time I guess is time to start thinking about an active deprecation of devfsd.

[Comment 4 Rod Furey 2004-12-06 09:05:21 UTC]

Ok, I've finally gotten the chance to do this again.

As noted above, a new installation from the Universal CD and doing a stage 3 install produces this problem. You can also repro it by doing an upgrade from 1.4 (do a sync and then emerge portage like it says). I've tried both ways and it breaks both times.

The installation from the Universal CD is followed. The following occurs:

The webpage says linux-2.6.9 but the /usr/src/linux link points to /usr/src/linux-2.6.7-gentoo-r14.

gentoo-dev-sources was emerged via the internet (it downloaded the things).

I've included Sun GEM support hopefully to fix a later problem with the installation not recognising the ethernet card.

Support for ADB raw keycodes is not in Macintosh device drives as referred to on the web page.

There is no Enhanced RTC in character devices. Similarly in General Setup there is no Support for /dev/rtc. I've used the Generic /dev/rtc emulation option in Character devices - n.b. I've not used Extended RTC operation.

emerge info is... (assuming no typing errors - I've double checked but...)

Portage 2.0.51_rc4 (default-ppc-2004.3, gcc-3.4.1, glibc-2.3.3.20040420-r1, 2.6.7-gentoo-r14 ppc)
==================================================================
System uname: 2.6.7-gentoo-r14 ppc 740/750
Gentoo Base System version 1.4.16
Autoconf: sys-devel/autoconf-2.59-r4
Automake: sys-devel/automake-1.8.5-r1
Binutils: sys-devel/binutils-2.15.90.0.3-r3
Headers:  sys-kernel/linux-headers-2.4.22
Libtools: sys-devel/libtool-1.5.2-r5
ACCEPT_KEYWORDS="ppc"
AUTOCLEAN="yes"
CFLAGS="-O2 -mtune=G3 -fno-strict-aliasing -pipe"
CHOST="powerpc-unknown-linux-gnu"
COMPILER=""
CONFIG_PROTECT="/etc /usr/kde/2/share/config /usr/kde/3/share/config /usr/share/config /var/qmail/control"
CONFIG_PROTECT_MASK="/etc/gconf /etc/env.d"
CXXFLAGS="-O2 -mtune=G3 -fno-strict-aliasing -pipe"
DISTDIR="/usr/portage/distfiles"
FEATURES="autoaddcvs ccache distlocks"
GENTOO_MIRROS="ftp://ftp.easynet.nl/mirror/gentoo http://ftp.snt.utwente.nl/pub/os/linux/gentoo ftp://mirror.nutsmaas.nl/gentoo/ ftp://sunsite.informatik.rwth-aachen.de/pub/Linux/gentoo"
MAKEOPTS="-j2"
PKGDIR="/usr/portage/packages"
PORTAGE_TMPDIR="/var/tmp"
PORTDIR="/usr/portage"
PORTDIR_OVERLAY=""
SYNC="rsync://rsync.gentoo.org/gentoo-portage"
USE="berkdb dvd gdbm gif jpeg nls pam perl png ppc python readline ssl truetype"


Previous installs have shown that emergeing udev before building the kernel and then not using devfs gets the system up but then you can't login - seems that /etc/pam.d/ isn't properly populated. emergeing shadow and pam-login before the kernel build fixed it in prior installs for me. However someone over on the forums says that this will fix it:

add the USE flag "pam" in /etc/make.conf
USE="pam"
and then emerge shadow

I dunno. I've currently left the test system in the status above. Prior tests have shown that I was also missing the ethernet card but maybe the build just didn't correectly id the ethernet card. A check using lspci from the Universal CD shows it as using Sun GEN support so I've built that into the kernel.

As far as I can tell I've done everything that I should do according to the manual to get this installed using a stage3 install. And if I've done something wrong then I'm not the only one. 

[Comment 5 Rod Furey 2005-01-25 05:53:48 UTC]

You may as well close this off. It's obvious that udev fixes this problem and that devfs will be deprecated. Installing shadow and pam-login also fixes the login problems.

[Comment 6 Joe Jezak (RETIRED) 2005-03-27 20:08:08 UTC]

Closing this bug since the 2005.0 install media use udev by default instead of devfs.