On Mon, 2006-12-11 at 20:59 +0000, Linux Kernel Mailing List wrote:

Gitweb:     http://git.kernel.org/git/?p=linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux-2.6.git;a=commit;h=8d610dd52dd1da696e199e4b4545f33a2a5de5c6
Commit:     8d610dd52dd1da696e199e4b4545f33a2a5de5c6
Parent:     8993780a6e44fb4e7ed34e33458506a775356c6e
Author:     Linus Torvalds [off-list ref]
AuthorDate: Mon Dec 11 12:12:04 2006 -0800
Committer:  Linus Torvalds [off-list ref]
CommitDate: Mon Dec 11 12:12:04 2006 -0800

    Make sure we populate the initroot filesystem late enough
    
    We should not initialize rootfs before all the core initializers have
    run.  So do it as a separate stage just before starting the regular
    driver initializers.
    
    Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds [off-list ref]

This seems to be what's triggering the apparent memory corruption we've
been seeing recently -- in the case of the Fedora kernel it manifests
itself as a BUG() in cache_alloc_refill() when the pmac ide driver
initialises.

Another report was at http://lkml.org/lkml/2006/12/17/4

We've been seeing it on a Mac Mini too, and I managed to reproduce it on
my shinybook this evening by booting with 'mem=512M'.

One side-effect of this patch is to move the call to free_initrd() much
later in the init sequence, potentially after other memory management
code is assuming it's already been freed.

-- 
dwmw2