Welcome back, Tyson! On 1/29/10 9:08 PM, Tyson Sawyer wrote: > Hello, > > A small voice from the distant past here. > > I have a custom system using LinuxBIOS V1. Yes! 1! This is a > PIII/440BX based system. > > We have found that we can boot 2.6.23-17, but can not boot 2.6.24. > Investigation using characters posted on the serial port suggest that > we are starting the kernel and getting to about the point where the > clock speed of the CPU and then it just stops as far as we can tell. Could you provide a log of the boot with each kernel? It might help getting an idea of what could be going wrong.
> We've found that if we put in more output to the serial port, it dies > earlier in the code. We can't be sure, bit it appears that it might be > some sort of a time based problem. It dies after a certain amount of > time and if we use that time by polling characters out the serial > port, then we don't get as far through the code before death. How early in the code can you get it to die? I wonder whether some watchdog driver could cause the trouble? > One thought that almost fits the facts is that a interrupt might be > occurring and not handled properly. But it happens that the CPU clock > speed code disables interrupts and this is where it is dying. Knowing a bit more about the hardware and kernel configuration would certainly help. > There seems to have been a number of changes in 2.6.24 to support > booting kernels in virtual machines and to merge ia64 and ia32 under > x86. Some notes were added about 32 bit boot loaders that reference > LinuxBIOS. However, we've been unable to find what it is that we are > doing wrong. We have grep'ed the internet and browsed through the > CoreBoot email archives, but failed to find anything that might have > been in either "place". Worst case you could diff between 2.6.23-17 and 2.6.24 and do a binary search over the differences until you find the culprit. But maybe there is a higher level approach that wants to be taken first. Best regards, Stefan -- coresystems GmbH • Brahmsstr. 16 • D-79104 Freiburg i. Br. Tel.: +49 761 7668825 • Fax: +49 761 7664613 Email: i...@coresystems.de • http://www.coresystems.de/ Registergericht: Amtsgericht Freiburg • HRB 7656 Geschäftsführer: Stefan Reinauer • Ust-IdNr.: DE245674866 -- coreboot mailing list: coreboot@coreboot.org http://www.coreboot.org/mailman/listinfo/coreboot