On Wed, 2006-08-16 at 15:48 -0600, Grant Likely wrote: > On 8/16/06, Clint Thomas <cthomas at soneticom.com> wrote: > > > > > > Hey, > > > > Using the powerpc development tree of Linux 2.4, I am trying to boot my > > system from CompactFlash using Xilinx SystemACE. My compact flash card has > > two partitions, a 16MB FAT16 that holds the combination FPGA image / Linux > > Kernel ELF file, and an Ext2 partition that holds the root file system. The > > system starts the boot process, uncompresses the Linux kernel and begins > > loading drivers. Part way into this process, it conducts a partition check > > of the drive being reported to it by SystemACE, however, it hangs at that > > point. No kernel panic, no error message, it simply hangs. Here is the > > output at that point... > > > > Partition check: > > xsysacea: > > > > what I am trying to find out is if this problem has been seen/fixed in the > > past? or did I format the CF card incorrectly?
I forgot to mention that we used to see this problem when the identify command that is sent during intialization fails. The driver is written in such a way that if any of this fails, the system hangs because it sits in a polling loop waiting for the correct response. There are no timeout failures... :( In our case we saw this error because we forgot to put a CF into the system [usually during development with NFS rootfs]. It is fairly easy to printk() the drivers init code to find out which step is stuck in the polling loop. > Checking partitions is a user-space activity (fsck). Remove it from > your init scripts. Besides, unless your using a microdrive, your ext2 > rootfs should be mounted read-only which greatly reduces the need for > fsck. (because FLASH will wear out after too many writes) The partition check he is referring to is part of a block device driver initialization. It is not fsck. If he were only so luck to be that far in the startup sequence... :) Jeff Angielski The PTR Group