I have the same symptoms here, on a Thinkpad T43p with Kernel-image-2.6.11-1-686. The genrtc module is definitely loaded by the initrd, as it is already present when booting with init=/bin/sh.
My mkinitrd config is attached. I think at this point it would be prefereable to use rtc instead of genrtc, as a lot of multimedia software uses /dev/rtc which genrtc doesn't provide.
# /etc/mkinitrd/mkinitrd.conf: # Configuration file for mkinitrd(8). See mkinitrd.conf(5). # # This file is meant to be parsed as a shell script. # What modules to install. MODULES=most # The length (in seconds) of the startup delay during which linuxrc may be # interrupted. DELAY=0 # If this is set to probe mkinitrd will try to figure out what's needed to # mount the root file system. This is equivalent to the old PROBE=on setting. ROOT=/dev/sda1 # This controls the permission of the resulting initrd image. UMASK=022 # Command to generate the initrd image. MKIMAGE='mkcramfs %s %s > /dev/null' # Set this to yes if you want to use busybox(1). BUSYBOX=no # Set this to no if you want to disable /usr/share/initrd-tools/scripts. PKGSCRIPTS=yes # This is the value for LD_LIBRARY_PATH when deciding what goes onto the # image. INITRD_LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$LD_LIBRARY_PATH # Hardcode partition to resume from so it doesn't have to be specified # on the command line. The command line will override this setting. # RESUME=
# /etc/mkinitrd/modules: Kernel modules to load for initrd. # # This file should contain the names of kernel modules and their arguments # (if any) that are needed to mount the root file system, one per line. # Comments begin with a `#', and everything on the line after them are ignored. # # You must run mkinitrd(8) to effect this change. # # Examples: # # ext2 # wd io=0x300 ahci libata sd_mod scsi_mod
