Problem booting recompiled kernel

[hootz]

I am hoping maybe someone can assist me with a kernel recompile. I am currently trying to recompile the kernel with tun/tap support as a loadable module for use with OpenVPN. After booting with the new kernel however, I get the following messages:

Back in ramcode: done
Second stage kernel: Decompressing -Error bunzip2ing kernel. Trying gunzip.
ERROR: unknown compression method
ERROR: internal error, invalid method
Error gunziping kernel. Giving up.
command line: 'console=ttyS0,115200 debug ip=off '
booting kernel...

I am fairly confident that the kernel is a valid bzipped image. I saw a reference somewhere that the max kernel size is 1800K. Could this be my problem?

-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1829616 Mar 29 05:48 vmlinuz.tun

Thank you for your help!

[ink]

I just spent a good few hours compiling and testing new kernels with NFS v4 support enabled and ran into exactly the same problem.
I managed to get around it by doing '# bzip2 -4 vmlinux' to compress the kernel instead of letting it choose a compression level (does it default to -9 (best) ?).
Perhaps the ROM decompression routines are getting out of date with respect to newer versions of bzip2 ?

Sadly I'm stuck with a new problem :

Code: Select all

VFS: Cannot open root device "<NULL>" or unknown-block(9,1)
Please append a correct "root=" boot option
Kernel panic - not syncing: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on unknown-block(9,1)

This is from a 2.6.21.7 kernel with the patches from http://gentoo.404ster.com/projects.php?action=view&id=4

[ink]

Answering my own question here,...

Don't forget to add MD support (RAID-1) in the kernel.

Doh