[1.] Booting from floppy with syslinux and loading a ramdisk image causes an
oops during boot
[2.]
I'm testing kernel 2.5.40 for a single floppy mini-distro which uses initrd.
I get an oops happening on boot, just after
RAMDISK: Compressed image found at block 0
[3.] ramdisk initrd syslinux
[4.] stock kernel version 2.5.40 (cannot boot the system to cat /proc/version)
[5.] Output of Oops.. message
I can't copy the entire oops message here because it's a lot of typing.
Needless to say, the message is
Unable to handle NULL pointer deference at address 00000000
eip = c0107b8d <__down+5d/e0>
call stack
c0113210 <default_wake_function+0/40>
c0107d5c <__down_failed+8/c>
c016a7cd <.text.lock.util+7d/90>
c0157ffe <devfs_remove_partitions+8e/a0>
c015841d <del_gendisk+1d/40>
c0195149 <initrd_release+19/50>
c013632b <__fput+2b/e0>
c0108c37 <syscall_call+7/b>
c0134dfd <filp_close+4d/60>
c0134e55 <sys_close+45/60>
c0108c37 <syscall_call+7/b>
c0105341 <prepare_namespace+b1/130>
c0105030 <init+0/160>
c0105056 etc
c0105030 etc
c0107025 etc
I've resolved most of the symbols so I hope it's clear where the error is
occuring (I'm not an expert at kernel debugging)
[6.] A small shell script or example program which triggers the problem:
Booting triggers the problem.
The syslinux config is:
KERNEL linux
APPEND initrd=rdimage vga=1 rw
[7.1.] Software (add the output of the ver_linux script here)
Can't boot to run ver_linux
syslinux 1.63 if that makes a difference.
[7.2.] Processor information (from /proc/cpuinfo):
Can't boot to cat /proc/cpuinfo (could go back to an old kernel, I know).
It's a Pentium-classic 133Mhz
[7.3.] Module information (from /proc/modules):
Modules not enabled in the kernel config
I hope this offers sufficient information to be useful.
Regards,
Mark