Re: initramfs breakage with 64-bits kernels?

["Kevin D. Kissell" <kevink@paralogos.com>]

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Geert Uytterhoeven wrote:
> On Thu, Apr 30, 2009 at 21:41, Florian Fainelli <florian@openwrt.org> wrote:
>   
>> I have been trying to get a 2.6.29 64-bits kernel for Cavium Octeon to work
>> with a 32-bits userland in an initramfs. While booting, the kernel does not
>> find the initramfs due to the check against initrd_start in populate_rootfs
>> (init/initramfs.c) failing.
>>     
>
> You mean the test for initrd_start being non-zero? Is your initramfs really at
> address zero?
I'm not set up to verify this, but I have a nagging suspicion that a
big-endian 64-bit kernel build could store an initrd_start address with
32 or fewer significant bits (i.e. it starts in the first 4GB) as a
64-bit pointer, but that the code in initramfs.c is testing the value as
a 32-bit scalar type.  I don't know about lmo but in kernel.org 2.6.29,
it's declared in include/linux/initrd.h as an extern unsigned long, not
a void *.  Little endian builds wouldn't see such a problem.

          Regards,

          Kevin K.

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