While working on the Tritech Service System, I made the mistake of using a glibc package compile for an i686 in the initramfs for an i586 kernel. I happened to do some searching to figure out the source of the problem, since all of my kernels would crash with this message in the exact same place, and thought I’d share it with everyone. This could frustrate custom Linux distro attempts easily.

In short: if the kernel panics because something “attempted to kill init!” then make sure your C library (glibc, eglibc, uclibc, dietlibc, whatever) is not compiled for a CPU higher than the CPU you’re trying to run on.

What’s happening is the system is attempting to execute “init” which immediately terminates due to the fact that the library uses invalid CPU instructions (the older processor doesn’t know about the newer instructions compiled into the library). The message “attempted to kill init!” is technically correct: init was killed because it tried to do something bad, but init is required to run anything else, so once init immediately crashes out, there’s nothing left for the system to do, and the kernel hangs itself up.