Hello,

Citando g4sra via Dng <dng@???>:

> I have an old Rpi 2B that will boot its original Raspbian fine but
> panics 'killing init' on Devuan.
> Has anybody else experienced this ?
>
> The only difference I can discern is that the Devuan repository
> executables (init) are compiled as PIE.
> Any suggestions to further the diagnosis of this issue gratefully received.
>  

I can tell you what it is not about :)
it is not because Init was compiled with -fpic ..

There are a ton of options for that,
The most basic one is not even related with init..

When you launch the kernel, you pass to it the roofs, so that he can
mount it( to cal init after )..
If the rootfs is wrongly passed in bootargs, the kernel will attempt
to launch init, but will panic,
Because to launch init it means that he already mounted the
FileSystem, but that doesn't happened...

So, I would ask you, about the contents of bootargs:
this are the contents of mine:
'earlyprintk=serial,ttyAMA0,115200n8 console=ttyAMA0,115200n8
console=tty0 root=/dev/mmcblk0p2 rw rootfstype=ext4 elevator=noop
fsck.repair=yes rootwait net.ifnames=0 smsc95xx.turbo_mode=N
dwc_otg.lpm_enable=0 kgdboc=ttyAMA0,115200 selinux=0 noinitrd'

this is my /proc/cmdline:
'# cat /proc/cmdline
console=ttyAMA0,115200 kgdboc=ttyAMA0,115200 root=/dev/mmcblk0p2
rootfstype=ext4 rootwait''

and my fstab:
'# cat /etc/fstab

# <file system>    <dir>    <type>    <options>        <dump>        <pass>
/dev/mmcblk0p1        /boot    vfat    defaults        0        2
/dev/mmcblk0p2        /    ext4    defaults,noatime    0        1
/dev/zram0         swap    swap    pri=1            0        0'

If you have the bootargs correct for rootfs, check '/etc/fstab', if
its the same. :)
here in my case:
putting  '/dev/mmcblk1p2' instead of '/dev/mmcblk0p2'( in fstab ) will
also lead to a kernel panic, has the system cannot mount root
filesystem..

Does you were operating your RPI before with devuan, or you just tried devuan?
How did you tried devuan?
making a mix between respbian, and devuan rootfs?
Or it was via a devuan image?

You can take also, to the forums, were maybe you will receive better support,
https://dev1galaxy.org/viewforum.php?id=24

Best Regards,
tux