2.0.31 legacy 386 compatibility?

J. Maynard Gelinas (jmg@iac.net)
Mon, 12 Jan 1998 12:12:30 -0500 (EST)

Hello,
I have a 386/DX25 Chips based motherboard (82c80x) with 8MB of
chip RAM, and a BIOS dating at 1989, which cannot run linux
2.0.31+glibc (Redhat 5.0). It _can_ run 2.0.29 with the old libc
(redhat 4.0 based with plenty of modifications - though I had to
compile a few kernels to get it bootable), but the problems have been
getting consistently worse since about 2.0.18. Basically, it freezes
right after either the serial init, parallel init, SCSI driver init,
or RAMdisk init without logging anything. If I move the drive
containing the OS to a 486 (SIS chipset based) the machine boots just
fine. Because of this I've not been able to install RedHat on the 386
from floppy, and have been forced to install from the 486 then compile
test kernels from there. And I've tried at least seven kernels with
varying options removed:

- Old IDE/MFM disk driver (not enhanced)
- No RAMdisk support
- No kernel modules - monolithic kernel only
- No PCI support (using a mono ISA herc card for video)
- No parallel support
- No IDE/Floppy support (using Adaptec 1542 controller)
- Only one NIC driver

I've pulled out all extraneous boards to reduce the
possibility of conflicts. I know the IO Base addresses of all the
boards which are installed and know they are being initialized
properly on the 486.... so, why can this machine boot a 2.0.29
kernel, but not 2.0.31?

I can't imagine building a smaller monolithic kernel. I
simply did _not_ add in support for any device not in the machine. It
still freezes.... This machine is kinda important to me since it's my
IP_MASQ router/gateway to the world. I've been using 2.0.29 with the
IP_MASQ Bumper patch, but if it turns out that support for these old
machines is dead I may have to upgrade the router hardware (which I'd
rather not do when this system is perfectly fast enough for that job).
Can anyone else report a functional legacy 386 system here, or is
this global to all 386's?

Thanks!
J. Maynard Gelinas