3.9.7, 3.10-rc7 - UEFI stalls at boot (nothing displayed), when bootingwith mem=300M

From: Matthew Thode
Date: Thu Jun 27 2013 - 12:58:39 EST


There is an early boot failure with linux-3.[9,10].??? when booting
using uefi on low memory systems.

This seems like it might be hardware specific, I am running on a Lenovo
T520, running bios version 1.42, firmware rev 1.36.

This seems to be limited to x86_64, as i386 does boot.

I build my initram into the kernel image, the following boot line
triggers the issue. The issue causes no kernel messages to be printed
to screen (looks like the kernel isn't loading at all to my untrained eyes).

linux /kernel-3.9.7 mem=300M

the following link contains kernel images and vmlinux for both amd64 and
the referenced kernel versions
http://dev.gentoo.org/~prometheanfire/bugs/471626/

we are tracking the bug here (keep in mind, this is NOT a pax bug)
https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=471626

I have tested the following combinations.
amd64 - 300M - 3.9.7 - bug hit
amd64 - 300M - 3.10-rc7 - big hit
amd64 - 16G - 3.9.7 - bug not hit
amd64 - 16G - 3.10-rc7 - bug not hit
i386 - 300M - 3.9.7 - bug not hit
i386 - 300M - 3.10-rc7 - other bug possibly hit
i386 - 16G - 3.9.7 - bug not hit
i386 - 16G - 3.10-rc7 - other bug possibly hit

the pictures taken for the other possible bug hit are located at
http://goo.gl/741ub


--
-- Matthew Thode (prometheanfire)

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