Re: Bootstrapping on KISS GNU/Linux

[Michael Forney <mforney%mforney.org@localhost>]

On 2023-11-08, Julius Schwartzenberg <julius.schwartzenberg%gmail.com@localhost> wrote:
> Apologies it took me some time, but I managed to create a VM. It's a
> very minimal system: https://www.s-berg.nl/files/kiss32-small.vdi.xz
>
> I created it using QEMU, but the image type is meant for VirtualBox, so
> I hope it works without issues in either of them.

I had a look, and it seems that this system has some serious errors booting:

	=> Welcome to KISS!
	=> Mounting pseudo filesystems...
	mount: mounting dev on /dev failed: No such device
	mkdir: can't create directory '/dev/pts': Read-only file system
	mkdir: can't create directory '/dev/shm': Read-only file system
	mount: mounting devpts on /dev/pts failed: No such file or directory
	mount: mounting shm on /dev/shm failed: No such file or directory
	ln: /dev/fd: Read-only file system
	ln: /dev/stdin: Read-only file system
	ln: /dev/stdout: Read-only file system
	ln: /dev/stderr: Read-only file system
	=> Starting device manager...
	/lib/init/rc.boot: line 40: can't create /dev/null: Read-only file system
	/lib/init/rc.boot: line 48: can't create /dev/null: Read-only file system
	=> Remounting rootfs as ro...

devtmpfs is failing to mount, and as a result there are missing
fundamental devices like /dev/null. This is also preventing important
filesystems like /dev/pts and /dev/shm from mounting correctly, since
this all happens before / is remounted as read-write.

Since /dev/null doesn't exist, it gets created as a regular file by a
redirection like 2>/dev/null. When pkgsrc goes to create PLIST, it
starts with `cat /dev/null /path/to/cwrappers/PLIST >
/path/to/.PLIST-1src`, so it ends up reading the error output of the
previous command that redirected to /dev/null.

As for why /dev is failing to mount, the error `No such device` leads
me to think that your kernel is built without CONFIG_DEVTMPFS=y, but
the boot script requires it. Though I can't tell for sure since the
kernel is also built without an embedded config. I booted with another
kernel, and this seemed to solve the boot errors and pkgsrc bootstrap
failure.