Re: initrd problems

On Thu, Jan 18, 2001 at 05:27:18PM -0500, Sébastien Côté wrote:

I finally figured out a small part of the problem...  My initrd_start
was overwritten (to 0) by the function start_kernel in init/main.c :

<snip>

I don't really understand this function... Why would my initrd be
overwritten?!?  Anyways, I commented it out to see what would happen.

Because it's in the wrong place and the kernel is walking all over
it.  Usually because a bootloader couldn't handle relocating the
image to a safe place.

<snip>

sb is NULL.  Damn..  What now?  Is it possible that my initrd has been
erased like the kernel told me?  What else could it be?

Yes.

I was also wondering if I loaded the kernel correctly.  I put my
zImage+initrd (zvmlinux.initrd) at address 0 of ram.  Since I compiled
the kernel with debug symbols, it takes a few Megs... Could it be too
large for it's own good?  Maybe somebody knows about the answer to that
one!

What does the bootloader show when it relocates the zImage and initrd?
How about a progress dump so we have something to help you with?  You
make some comments about not using a special bootloader then say
you are loading a zImage (from the Sandpoint port) which does have
a relocating bootloader.  This smells like a custom board port where
you've gutted or dropped a bootloader and don't have the r3-r6 set
up correctly for entry into arch/ppc/kernel/head.S.  Are you really
just dropping vmlinux at address 0?  Details details...

--
Matt Porter
MontaVista Software, Inc.
mporter@mvista.com

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