2.4.20-pre11 mounts initrd read/only

2.4.20-pre11 mounts initrd read/only

[Phil Howard]

I just finished helping someone (who was trying to build a bootable CD
using my BICK package) debug why they were getting a failure with
2.4.20-pre11, but things worked OK with 2.4.18.  After several cycles
of "try this" and finally getting his kernel output captured via a
serial port, I found the problem.  The initial ram disk mounted at /
was being mounted read/only in 2.4.20-pre11 whereas it was mounted
read/write in 2.4.18 (I haven't tested 2.4.19 yet because previously
upgrading the kernel on a rescue CD wasn't a priority).

The work around is to either specify "rw" in the boot parameters or to
do a remount to remove the read/only bit during initialization.  The
next version of BICK will have this dealt with.

I suspect this was just a change being made to default to read/only for
hard disk mounted root filesystems.  I can see maybe a few suprises it
might cause, but mostly no problems.  But it could be more problematic,
or at least confusing, for initial ram disk situations.  Maybe it should
test for whether / is initrd and turn off MS_RDONLY if so.

ref:  http://freshmeat.net/projects/bick/

-- 
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| Phil Howard - KA9WGN |   Dallas   | http://linuxhomepage.com/ |
| phil-nospam@ipal.net | Texas, USA | http://ka9wgn.ham.org/    |
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