My '94 vintage 486 has problems booting 2.5.55 and 2.5.56.
When it fails, the boot gets to loading the kernel and
printing "Ok, booting the kernel.". Then there is a short
pause (line a tenth of a second) and the machine reboots.
After doing a binary search with "for(;;);" statements
(printk doesn't work this early) I found that the reboot
occurs in arch/i386/mm/init.c:kernel_physical_mapping_init():
(start_kernel() -> setup_arch() -> paging_init() ->
pagetable_init() -> kernel_physical_mapping_init())
diff -ruNp linux-2.5.55/arch/i386/mm/init.c linux-2.5.55.hack/arch/i386/mm/init.c
--- linux-2.5.55/arch/i386/mm/init.c 2003-01-12 02:20:49.000000000 +0100
+++ linux-2.5.55.hack/arch/i386/mm/init.c 2003-01-12 01:44:49.000000000 +0100
@@ -134,6 +134,7 @@ static void __init kernel_physical_mappi
pgd = pgd_base + pgd_ofs;
pfn = 0;
+ //for(;;);
for (; pgd_ofs < PTRS_PER_PGD; pgd++, pgd_ofs++) {
pmd = one_md_table_init(pgd);
if (pfn >= max_low_pfn)
@@ -151,6 +152,7 @@ static void __init kernel_physical_mappi
}
}
}
+ for(;;);
}
static inline int page_kills_ppro(unsigned long pagenr)
If I uncomment the first "//for(;;);" the kernel hangs, but if
I keep it commented out, the kernel reboots -- i.e. it doesn't
get to the final "for(;;);" at the end of the function.
The problem is apparently related to the size of the kernel.
With gcc-2.95.3 and my normal config for this machine,
size vmlinux is
text data bss dec hex filename
1330953 109008 125656 1565617 17e3b1 vmlinux
and the kernel reboots. If I alter the size by changing some
irrelevant config option (like disabling INPUT_MOUSEDEV or
enabling KALLSYMS), the reboot problem doesn't occur.
With gcc-3.2 the bug disappears, but only because gcc-3.2
generates a much larger code segment. If I remove some
driver & fs config options, the vmlinux size becomes almost
the same as above, and the reboot bug appears again.
The same kernel that fails on the 486 boots Ok on my newer
test boxes, so the problem is either 486-specific, related
to the actual memory size, or the BIOS memory size reporting
method (the 486 uses int 15 0x88); here's what 2.5.54 says:
BIOS-provided physical RAM map:
BIOS-88: 0000000000000000 - 000000000009f000 (usable)
BIOS-88: 0000000000100000 - 0000000001c00000 (usable)
The 486 has no known HW problems, and it survives memtest86.
/Mikael
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Wed Jan 15 2003 - 22:00:39 EST