initrd and large memory booting problems (2.2.14)

From: Matt D. Robinson (yakker@turbolinux.com)
Date: Mon Apr 10 2000 - 17:36:28 EST


Hopefully not the stupid question of the week ...

I have an issue with using initrd with SCSI boot modules. The only real
thing initrd does is 'insmod sym53c8xx.o'. The unfortunate thing is my
boot doesn't complete, as initrd is overwritten when the kernel initially
boots (and the root filesystem can't mount as a result of no insmod, which
is a result of initrd being disabled).

Important information:

        - System is an HP LH4, 4 processors, _4_ GB of memory
        - Things *work* with initrd if I specify "LILO: linux mem=960M"
        - Things *don't work* unless I specify a "mem=" parameter less
          than 1040M (makes sense based on size of kernel memory)
        - Error message reported on boot:

          initrd overwritten: (0x<value> < (0x<value>) - disabling it.

        - Problem occurs with either PAGE_OFFSET = 0x80000000 or 0xc0000000
        - Changing processor count or kernel revision <= 2.2.14 doesn't
          fix the problem

The error message is reported from init/main.c:

#ifdef CONFIG_BLK_DEV_INITRD
        if (initrd_start && !initrd_below_start_ok && initrd_start < memory_start) {
                printk(KERN_CRIT "initrd overwritten (0x%08lx < 0x%08lx) - "
                    "disabling it.\n",initrd_start,memory_start);
                initrd_start = 0;
        }
#endif

So it looks like initrd is being loaded at a location before the start of
kernel memory (which makes sense, based on the code and on the size of
memory). What doesn't make sense is why the initrd isn't being loaded to
a valid location in the first place, even if I do have 4GB of memory.
If it's the case that I have to boot with the SCSI module in the kernel
(not using initrd) for large memory systems, that's fine, but knowing
exactly why that's the case would be nice.

Any feedback is appreciated. I'm probably missing something obvious, or
there's a bug I haven't read about. I'm still investigating, but anything
I've spaced out on would be good to know. Thanks.

--Matt

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