No init system on Ubuntu 18.04 base

February 10, 2020

I had some trouble setting up a Zynq system with Ubuntu 18.04 base image as the rootfs. The kernel would panic when it handed off to the rootfs:

5.755108] VFS: Mounted root (ext4 filesystem) on device 179:2.
[    5.764260] devtmpfs: mounted
[    5.767397] Freeing unused kernel memory: 832K
[    5.785642] Run /sbin/init as init process
[    5.801110] Run /etc/init as init process
[    5.805797] Run /bin/init as init process
[    5.810504] Run /bin/sh as init process
[    5.833609] [drm] Cannot find any crtc or sizes
/bin/sh: 0: Can't open earlyprintk
[    5.869633] Kernel panic - not syncing: Attempted to kill init! exitcode=0x00007f00

The console messages were on the mark and indeed none of /sbin/init, /etc/init, /bin/init existed and /bin/sh links to dash which isn’t an init system. I was a little mystified as to what changed from 16.04 but finally I discovered a blog post that went over all the additional parts stripped out for the Ubuntu 18.04 minimal image and in particular because containers are king: “This base filesystem tarball also lacks a kernel and an init system, as it’s intended to be used inside of a chroot or application container.”

Fortunately, after chroot into the rootfs a simple apt-get -y install systemd will setup /sbin/init to link /sbin/init -> /lib/systemd/systemd as it should be for an Ubuntu system.

As a side note I found Gentoo Linux Chroot had the right mount incantation for getting apt-get in chroot to behaving nicely.

$ sudo mount --rbind /dev /mnt/mychroot/dev
$ sudo mount --make-rslave /mnt/mychroot/dev
$ sudo mount -t proc /proc /mnt/mychroot/proc
$ sudo mount --rbind /sys /mnt/mychroot/sys
$ sudo mount --make-rslave /mnt/mychroot/sys
$ sudo mount --rbind /tmp /mnt/mychroot/tmp