I've isolated it to approximately 150k worth of diffs, but unfortunately
I can't narrow it down any further since the changes involve moving away
from a single TSS per process to a single TSS per CPU, and so the
changes touch a huge number of files and are interrelated, so I can't
pull one out without pulling them all out.
Interestingly enough, the Linux 2.3.10+ kernel (i.e., the one with the
150k diffs applied to make it just enough like 2.3.11 so that it won't
boot on my Vaio) boots just fine of my 400 MHz Celeron E-machines. So
whatever it is, the change is something which makes it incompatible with
the Vaio, but not necessarily other machines --- which makes sense,
since otherwise someone else would have commented by now. And
unfortunately, the problem is occuring early enough in the boot cycle
that printk isn't working yet, so I can't debug the problem using
printk.
This problem has made it difficult to get serial and random driver
submitted, since it meant I couldn't test them on my laptop while I was
on the road at Linux World, et. al. I'll continue poking at this
problem as I have time, but I'm going to shift focus towards getting the
serial and random updates tested and submitted to Linus, now that I've
found another machine on which I can boot and test 2.3 kernels.
In the meantime, if someone else has seen this and wants to poke at this
some more, I'll be happy to send them what I have so far --- namely, my
isolation of the subset of the 2.3.10 -> 2.3.11 patches which causes the
problems. I'd also be interested if other folks have had problems
booting recent 2.3 kernels on laptops or other machines, or any other
insights as to what might be going on.
Thanks!!
- Ted
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