Re: Regression: boot failure on AMD Elan TS-5500

[Jeremy Fitzhardinge <jeremy@goop.org>]

Sean Young wrote:
> On Mon, Jun 16, 2008 at 06:37:12AM -0700, Jeremy Fitzhardinge wrote:
>   
>> Rusty Russell wrote:
>>     
>>> On Monday 16 June 2008 22:11:39 Sean Young wrote:
>>>  
>>>       
>>>> The symptons are either a crash or reboot on booting the kernel. No
>>>> printk's have occurred yet -- even with early printk on.
>>>>
>>>> 2.6.15 worked on this board however current does not. I've bisected it to:
>>>>
>>>> 	commit a24e785111a32ccb7cebafd24b1b1cb474ea8e5d
>>>> 	Author: Rusty Russell <rusty@rustcorp.com.au>
>>>> 	Date:   Sun Oct 21 16:41:35 2007 -0700
>>>>
>>>> 	    i386: paravirt boot sequence
>>>>    
>>>>         
>>> Hi Sean,
>>>
>>>   Thanks for tracking this down.  Can we try reverting this in pieces to 
>>>   see exactly what the cause was?
>>>
>>> 1) Revert arch/x86/boot/compressed/head_32.S
>>> 2) If that doesn't fix it, Try removing the 8 lines which were added to 
>>> arch/x86/kernel/head_32.S
>>>  
>>>       
>> And the arch/x86/boot/compressed/misc_32.c change too, just in case...
>>     
>
> Reverting only head_32.S makes the problem go away. I didn't try any other
> changes.
>
>   
>>> I assume this is CONFIG_PARAVIRT=n?
>>>       
>
> Indeed.
>
>   
>> What bootloader does this platform use?  I wonder if it's setting things 
>> up in an unexpected way?
>>     
>
> It's syslinux. That must be the culprit, considering the change to head_32.S.
>
> I'm digging in syslinux right now. 

Weird. That change has been in there a fairly long time now, and lots of 
people have successfully used syslinux to boot it in that time.  Must be 
some specific combination of factors on your platform.

I would guess the KEEP_SEGMENTS flag is being set for some reason,  but 
it's hard to imagine how, unless there's some memory corruption going on.

    J