Re: 2.1.78 MCA fails boot w/ ESDI, initrd (RAM disk) & floppy

Gilbert Ramirez Jr. (gram@merece.uthscsa.edu)
Sun, 11 Jan 1998 00:06:55 -0600 (CST)

As Alan Cox said:
>
> > Just a little "me too". My PS/2 Model 70 with ESDI worked fine in the
> > 2.1.5x series. Now I've tried 2.1.78, and it's as if the kernel
> > can't use the ESDI block device to mount the ext2fs... it can't mount
> > the filesystem, and therefore can't get init either. The kernel
> > panics.
>
> Can you see if you can find which kernel revision broke your ESDI support ?
>
> Alan

Yes. After an evening of kernel compiling (not on the 386!), I have
narrowed down the point at which my MCA machine stopped working. My
computer has no weird drivers. The only thing of note about this computer
is that it's MCA, has ESDI, and has 6 MB of RAM.

2.1.57 Works
2.1.62 Works
2.1.69 Works
2.1.74 Works
2.1.75 Kernel doesn't compile (line 614 in arch/i386/kernel/ptrace.c)
2.1.76 Kernel doesn't compile (same problem as above, hard_math undeclared)
2.1.77 Kernel panic: No init found.
2.1.78 Kernel panic: No init found.

I have one ESDI drive. The ESDI driver has always complained about
attention errors, but Linux has always booted to the login prompt.

Here's the dmesg output which appears during _both_ good and bad bootups:

(all lines are preceded with "PS/2 ESDI:"; the jiffies differ a bit at each
boot)

integrated ESDI adapter found in slot 4
DMA Arbitration Level: 5
hard reset...
Attention error. interrupt status: EF
status: 08
reset interrupt after 1575 jiffies, 15.75 secs
Drive 0
Device Configuration Status for drive 0
Spares/cyls: 2Config bits: Zero Defect, Skewed Found, Non-Removable,
Retries
Number of RBA's: 157696
Physical number of cylinders: 1063, Sectors/Track: 39, Heads: 4
Drive 1
Whaa. Error occurred...
Device: 1, interrupt ID: 0E
6 status words, command: 29
command status code: 0E, command error code: 13
device error code: Not Ready, Not Selected, , 00
Blocks to do: 0, Last Cyl: 0 Head: 0 Sector: 0
Blocks required ECC: 0

Then, both good and bad bootups continue beyond the PS/2 ESDI driver:
(note: eda1 is extf2, eda2 is swap)

Partition Check:
eda: eda1 eda2
VFS: Mounted root (ext2 filesystem) readonly.
Freeing unused kernel memory: 20k freed.

At this point the output from 2.1.74 and 2.1.77 differ:

2.1.74:
Adding Swap: 8188K swap-space (priority -1)
[and Linux boots to login prompt normally]

2.1.77 and 2.1.78: (and possibly 2.1.75 and 2.1.76)
Kernel panic: No init found. Try passing init= option to kernel.

So, 2.1.77 sees my ESDI drive, it sees the 2 partitions, it *says* that is
mounts ext2fs, but 2.1.77 can't find my init. 2.1.74 can.

Any ideas?

--gilbert

-- 
_______________________________________________________________________
Gilbert Ramirez Jr.                     gram@merece.uthscsa.edu
University of Texas                     http://merece.uthscsa.edu/gram/
Health Science Center at San Antonio    University Health System