out-of-the-box initrd images do not include 32bit pccard support

[Raeff]

Binary package hint: initramfs-tools

I use an external hdd for testing Feisty. My notebook has only builtin USB1.1, so I decided to use a FireWire PCcard. The desktop CD (herd4) has no problems to detect the FireWire card and the external disk. Installation worked without problems.

Because my BIOS doesn't know a thing about FireWire I had to do the following:
To boot Feisty on the external drive I had to copy Feisty's /boot/* over to my internal hdd (containing my Edgy system) and tweak my grub configuration. Everything worked up to the point where the initrd image tried to mount the Feisty root partition (on the FireWire disk). This failed because the initrd image does not contain the yenta_socket module for 32 bit PCcard support.

My workaround: build a new initrd image with the line "yenta_socket" added to /etc/initramfs-tools/modules. Now I can boot Feisty flawlessly.

My suggestion: as you support plain old PCMCIA with the current initrd image, you should support 32 bit PC cards, too!

ProblemType: Bug
Date: Tue Feb 20 22:07:35 2007
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 7.04
Uname: Linux pollux 2.6.20-8-generic #2 SMP Tue Feb 13 05:18:42 UTC 2007 i686 GNU/Linux

[Andreas Moog (ampelbein)]

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. You reported this bug a while ago and there hasn't been any activity in it recently. We were wondering is this still an issue for you? Can you try with latest Ubuntu release? Thanks in advance.

[Raeff (raeff)]

Hi Andreas,

still an issue for me with Hardy (uname -a -> Linux pollux 2.6.24-21-generic #1 SMP Sat Jul 26 15:39:24 UTC 2008 i686 GNU/Linux). OTOH this is obviously not an issue for anyone else than me.

I have to admit that I don't know how initramfs-tools decides which modules to include (except that it considers the "modules" file in /etc/initramfs-tools). The strange thing is that it includes pcmcia.ko and pcmcia_core.ko but not yenta_socket.ko and dependants.

This is not a huge issue, but it makes it impossible to run ubuntu from any disk connected via cardbus adapters (i.e. firewire or usb2 cards) without building an initrd-image with yenta_socket.ko on another computer (or built-in disk).

Kind regards, Bernhard.

[loeschme (info-loesch)]

Hi,

this is an issue for me too but on Debian Lenny.
I want to run from a CF-Card via PCMCIA/CF adapter, booting from built-in disk ... added 'yenta_socket' to /etc/initramfs-tools/modules, did a 'update-initramfs -u -k all' but still same issue. It can't find the rootfs although i see the yenta_socket msgs on initrd load. So I tried the same with 'pcmcia', 'pcmcia_core', 'yenta_socket', 'rsrc_nonstatic','pccard' but neither worked. I changed the root=/dev/... entry in menu.lst with root=UUID= instead but that didnt help either.

Any suggestions what i did wrong or forgot?

regards, chris

[Thomas Hotz (thotz-deactivatedaccount)]

Is this still an issue for you?

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

[Expired for initramfs-tools (Ubuntu) because there has been no activity for 60 days.]