Two problems running 2.6.35.4 on CentOS-5.5 (x86_64) userspace

[Martin Knoblauch]

Hi, (please keep me on CC)

 in order to improve IO behavior on my brand new DELL Presision M4500 notebook, I have decided to try out a newer kernel compared to the 2.6.18-xxx CentOS one.

 Installing 2.6.35.4 went pretty well and besides small problems with two 
external/proprietary modules (my fault, I know ...) I only see two issues:

a) accessing the HW clock does not work

[root@lbwjxqm1 ~]# hwclock
Cannot access the Hardware Clock via any known method.
Use the --debug option to see the details of our search for an access method.
[root@lbwjxqm1 ~]# hwclock --debug
hwclock from util-linux-2.13-pre7
hwclock: Open of /dev/rtc failed, errno=19: No such device.
No usable clock interface found.
Cannot access the Hardware Clock via any known method.
[root@lbwjxqm1 ~]# ls -l /dev/rtc
crw------- 1 root root 10, 135 Aug 27 11:44 /dev/rtc

 It is well possible, that the problem is in the userspace, but how to find out?

b) kdump does not start

[root@lbwjxqm1 ~]# /etc/init.d/kdump status
Kdump is not operational
[root@lbwjxqm1 ~]# /etc/init.d/kdump start
Starting kdump:                                            [FAILED]
[root@lbwjxqm1 ~]# tail /var/log/messages
Aug 27 12:52:39 lbwjxqm1 kdump: No crashkernel parameter specified for running 
kernel
Aug 27 12:52:39 lbwjxqm1 kdump: failed to start up

Looking at grub.conf I find:

title CentOS (2.6.35.4)
        root (hd0,2)
        kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.35.4 ro root=LABEL=/ rhgb quiet crashkernel=256M@16M
        initrd /initrd-2.6.35.4.img

 So the entry in the messages files looks wrong. Again, this might be a cases of 
to old userspace (kexec-tools-1.102pre-96.el5_5.2), but who knows

Thanks for any advice on how to debug/fix the issues. Otherwise kernel looks OK. 
"dmesg" and config are attached.


Cheers
Martin
------------------------------------------------------
Martin Knoblauch
email: k n o b i AT knobisoft DOT de
www:   http://www.knobisoft.de

Attachment: config.gz
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Attachment: dmesg.gz
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Attachment: lspci.gz
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