From: Chris Samuel <chris@csamuel.org>
To: Alan Cox <alan@lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk>
Subject: Re: 2.6.38.3 and 2.6.39-rc4 hangs after "Booting the kernel" on quad Pentium Pro system
Date: Sat, 23 Apr 2011 10:16:18 +1000
User-Agent: KMail/1.13.6 (Linux/2.6.38-8-generic; KDE/4.6.2; x86_64; ; )
Cc: "H. Peter Anvin" <hpa@zytor.com>, Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>,
        Ingo Molnar <mingo@redhat.com>, x86@kernel.org,
        linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org
References: <201104222333.25546.chris@csamuel.org> <20110422173422.46134f20@lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk>
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Syt mae Alan! ;-)

On Sat, 23 Apr 2011 02:34:22 AM Alan Cox wrote:

> earlyprintk=3Dvga

Ahh, that's a new one on me, and it reveals that the kernel
has gone from 2.6.18 detecting:

256MB LOWMEM available.

to 2.6.39-rc4 detecting:

16MB LOWMEM available.

That would explain an awful lot..

> (or better yet earlyprintk=3DttyS0 and a serial port)

Hmm, I might still have a null modem cable hanging around..

> There are a couple of PPro funnies - there's an area of memory that
> must be excluded due to a chip errata and I seem to remember some
> PPro boxes also having slightly quirking E820 (BIOS memory
> reporting behaviour)

Sigh, that's just reminded me that a couple of years ago I
had a private discussion with H. Peter Anvin about 2.6.25
panic'ing on boot with:

initrd extends beyond end of memory (0x0ffef173 > ox01000000)

He gave me a modified syslinux to dump out memory information
and it reported:

INT 15h =3D f000:f859 DOS RAM: 638K (0x9f800) INT 12h: 638K (0x9f800)
INT 15 88: 0x3c00 (15360K) INT 15 E801: 0x0000 (0K) 0x0000 (0K)

He responded with:

# Right... you have a system dependent on E801, and somehow E801
# returns crap.
#
# I'm going to cook up a modified meminfo.c32 for you and see if
# we can't track this down.

Unfortunately nothing happened and when I prodded him it turned
out he'd been too busy, so I just kept on running old kernels
from that point on and completely forgot about why. :-(

Hope life is still good in Abertawe!

Chris
=2D-=20
 Chris Samuel  :  http://www.csamuel.org/  :  Melbourne, VIC

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