trouble looking up files after mount

[C Michael Sundius]

Hi,

I just started in on a contract that has a JFFS problem. my client is
in the midst of moving to 2.6.10 from 2.4.

They are mounting a jffs file system as root right off the bat with
no initrd, and while it seems to mount OK, no files subsequent
to the mount are found - I get errors indicating it cannot find
the console device and the init program. path_lookup seems
to return ENOENT. I have a BDI debugger and I have seen that
control gets to jffs2_lookup() but it doesn't find any files in the
root directory.

I checked a more recent version of mkfs.jffs2
and it seems to creat the same FS image as what we have
been using (sum gives same results) I think it was version
mtd-utils 1.0.0. my tools didnt'tcompile later versions
easily.

I'm very sure that the endian is not a probelm, I'm using
big throughout.

Here are my questions:
1) Should I really be telling my client to use an initrd? or can
they really get away without it - It was working fine without it
on 2.4. OR should I be telling him to use a more recent version
of linux.
2) Do I need to be using a newer version of mkfs.jffs2?
3) I did not fiddle with any of the advanced compression stuff
in the 2.6 jffs2 configuration.. I'm pretty sure I shouldn't touch
that, rite?
4) Does anyone have some thoughts about where I should be
looking.. it seems as though jffs should be stable enough
to at least read a directory... could it be my old compiler/tools?

thanks for your help...



C Michael Sundius
Solico Group LLC
232 Nevada St
San Francisco, CA 94110
msundius at sundius.com
(415)608-0121
http://www.sundius.com