Linus BK tree crashes with PANIC: INIT: segmentation violation

[Derek Atkins <warlord@MIT.EDU>]

Hi,

I've been trying to get a current 2.5 kernel up and running but I've
hit a wall.  When I run my machine with a current kernel I get the
following message to my terminal, repeated ad nausium:

  PANIC: INIT: segmentation violation at 0x804a08c (code)! sleeping for 30 seconds!

I've been working off of Linus' BK repository and was finally able to
get a "working" kernel when I backed up to approximately 2002-12-30
(which is sometime between 2.5.53 and 2.5.54).  That kernel works just
fine.

Sometime between December 30 and January 1 a patch was added that
causes the kernel to go into an infinite loop of Oopses.  Then
sometime later the behavior changed to the INIT problem I mentioned
above.

Does anyone have any clue how to deal with this?  I can assure you
that it is NOT a hardware problem (otherwise why would the same
hardware work with 2.4 and 2.5.53+?)  The only change being made here
is the kernel.

I have not had a chance to back out each and every ChangeSet
individually between Jan1 and Dec30 to figure out what was causing the
stream of oopses -- nor am I even confident that that would lead me to
a solution for the "PANIC: INIT" problem.

In case anyone cares, the most recent ChangeSet from my
confirmed-working (2.5.53+) tree is labeled:

  1.1004 02/12/30 13:47:09 torvalds@home.transmeta.com +2 -0
  Make x86 platform choice strings more easily selectable

However I have not guaranteed that this is the Changeset just before
it failed (I'm not enough of a bk guru to figure out how to pull down
one changeset at a time).

Any advice would be greatly appreciated....  I'd be more than happy to
try things out for people if you have tests you want me to run.

Thanks!

-derek

PS: I am not subscribed directly so please CC me on your replies.

-- 
       Derek Atkins, SB '93 MIT EE, SM '95 MIT Media Laboratory
       Member, MIT Student Information Processing Board  (SIPB)
       URL: http://web.mit.edu/warlord/    PP-ASEL-IA     N1NWH
       warlord@MIT.EDU                        PGP key available