I've been pestering a lot of mailing lists and newsgroups with this
problem, but so far I haven't even got a hint of what might be going
wrong. Since I have come to the conclusion that this is a problem
between just the kernel and my mainboard, I have decided to come to
this list with it. The symptoms:
I can't boot Linux:
- from floppies
- from CD-ROM
- from harddisk with LILO
- from a bare DOS with Loadlin
I can only boot it:
- from DOS with himem.sys and emm386 loaded.
It doesn't have to do with the size of the kernel (I guess), because it
happens with 200KB kernels (2.0.x and 2.2.x) as well.
What happens is that the compressed kernel image gets loaded into memory,
but then nothing else happens -- I don't see the "Uncompressing Linux"
message; the machine just freezes or reboots.
My understanding of the whole process is that first the entire kernel
image is loaded into (the lower 640K of) memory by whatever booting
mechanism, and then the kernel puts the processor into real mode and
starts executing. I'd think that the "Uncompressing Linux" message comes
at the very early beginning of the program code, and since I don't even
see that, something very fundamental must be going wrong.
Obviously, it must be a bug of my mainboard and it looks like a memory
access problem. Appearently emm386.exe "does" something "to" the memory so
that this doesn't happen. I'd like to hack around in the kernel sources to
find the point that doesn't work, but how? How to debug a kernel?
Or maybe someone has already found this bug and written a patch for it? I
have a Slot-I Superpower mainboard with VIA chipset. I can give more
details if anyone is interested.
Thank you,
**Daniel
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