RE: PROBLEM: Panic booting from USB disk in ioremap.c (line 81)

[Elliot Mackenzie]

Randy:

This issue just got a lot weirder but I have some more information.  

This is the weird part:
I applied the patch you suggested, and the system stopped panicking at
that point.  Instead, it just hung for about 10 minutes, eventually
kicking off again and finishing bootup.  To be sure, I then removed the
code and recompiled (clean), and now the original code started doing
that too (without your patch).  To my knowledge I changed nothing (not
even in BIOS), but I rebuilt the kernel again from the raw 2.6.3 source
to be sure - same result.

The interesting part (more information):
If we bypass the bootflag.c code (simply by putting "return 0;" as the
first line), the system will boot normally.  On shutdown we seem to be
getting a system jumping to maintenance mode, but I am not sure if its
related.  It appears you are right in assuming that the problem is
related to the bios sbf rather than the usb.  Doug pointed out to me
that looking through the stack trace, sbf_init is giving an rsdt_length
of something in the order of 1GB, and somehow the checks are not picking
it up.

Since it is now relevant, the BIOS is flashed to the most recent stable
BIOS for the ASUS P4SGX-MX motherboard (1005).

This is the tricky part:
When we bypass the bootflag code, and boot the "working" kernel, I am
able to capture a serial transcript.  However, I have been unsuccessful
in establishing a serial console for the broken 2.6.3 kernel to date.
It's possible I have done something strange while building one of the
kernels, but I am just trying to verify that now.  Are there
alternatives?

Currently the text on screen comes up way to quickly for me to capture,
and since I don't have a working serial console for the broken kernel
yet, I am not able to capture a transcript.  Previously I could just
type to you what I saw, but the kernel is now booting to the same point,
hanging 10 minutes then continuing.

Kind regards,
Elliot.

-----Original Message-----
From: Randy.Dunlap [mailto:rddunlap@xxxxxxxx] 
Sent: Saturday, 21 February 2004 3:32 PM
To: macka@xxxxxxxxxxx
Cc: lkml
Subject: RE: PROBLEM: Panic booting from USB disk in ioremap.c (line 81)


As enumerated below:
| Calling initcall 0xc03f7e19 pcibios_init
| Calling initcall 0xc03f819c netdev_init
| Calling initcall 0xc03f1e7c chr_dev_init
| Calling initcall 0xc03e7084 i8259_init_sysfs
| Calling initcall 0xc03e7101 init_timer_sysfs
| Calling initcall 0xc03e90e2 sbf_init


I still don't see how USB enters into it, but please try the patch
below to see if I'm on the right track or not.
It looks like sbf_init() is finding an invalid ACPI RSDT length field.
This patch will telll us if that's the case or not.

--
~Randy



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