I'm trying to debug an init script on a Linux system; I'm trying to pass init=/bin/sh to the kernel to make it start sh without starting init so I can run through the init sequence manually.
What I've found is that the kernel is starting init anyway. During bootup, one of the printk messages is the command line, and that is showing that the line is being set properly; in addition, I can affect other things using the kernel command line. I have checked to make sure the path exists; it does.
This is a busybox system, and init is a symlink to busybox; so to make sure busybox doesn't do strange magic when its PID is 1, I also tried running a non-busybox program as init; that didn't work, either. It seems that no matter what I do, init is run.
What could be causing this behavior?
Best Answer
Looking at Linux kernel source, I see that if the file /init exists, the kernel will always attempt to run it on the assumption that it's doing a ramdisk boot. Check your system to see if /init exists, if it does, then that's probably your problem.