[RndTbl] RHEL et al. - how to break mkinitrd(8)

[Adam Thompson]

CentOS 5.6 system.  Running happily.
Applied kernel update, reboot, PANIC - unable to mount root filesystem. 
(Along with other various weird error messages.)
Spent a lot of time deconstructing initrd(4)s.

Final root cause of the problem: in fstab(5), I had manually added a swap 
partition.

"mount -a" didn't care, but mkinitrd sure did: I had fstab like this:
      /dev/sda1 / ext3 defaults 1 1
      /dev/sdb1 / swap defaults 0 0

Mkinitrd(8) was tripping over the "/" in field #2 of the swap record, and 
generating a non-functional /init script in the initrd.  Changing the 
second line to read "/dev/sdb1 swap swap defaults 0 0" fixed the problem.

Aside from documenting this for the edification of others, what's the 
consensus: is this a bug in mkinitrd(8) that should be reported?  (i.e. it 
should do more sanity checks?)

-Adam Thompson
 athompso at athompso.net