Kernel freezes (no panic) on initrd--older hardware

[axs]

Hey all -- i've got this old P-MMX laptop with no hdd that ive been trying to make into a network appliance.. It has no cdrom, and it won't boot from USB. I've been using a boot disk with a genkernel kernel and initrd, to try and use a usb flash drive as the root device.

This works (or at least gets further) with my main system -- the initrd loads, finds the root device, mounts it.. However, when i try this on the laptop it freezes right when it should start init.

When i say freezes, i guess i mean it just doesn't start init -- the system is still active (ctrl-alt-del works), unlike when it panics and i can't do anything but cycle its power. Plus when i plug in and unplug the usb flash drive, it spits out the correct messages from usb-storage..

Any ideas? i've tried 2.6.16 and 2.6.17, building with gcc-3.4.6/glibc-2.3 and with gcc-4.1/glibc-2.4 -- no difference. Genkernel 3.3.x and 3.4.x don't seem to make a difference either. The kernel's options do match the hardware in the laptop, as far as i have been able to determine.

[erik258]

I cannot definitively solve your problem, but I can tell you one thing. in my experience, the gentoo bootcd kernels (and, I assume, genkernel, which i've never used) does a pretty bad job of booting on hardware from that era. the problem appears to be the hardware detection stuff and, in general, assumptions the developers made about what anyone's computer ought to have / be capable of in this day and age. well, i have lots of pentiums and many are happily running gentoo. but usually i have to pass in a few (...or maybe several) boot options to the kernel before itll cooperate.

some places to start: don't use a framebuffer. it doesn't really add functionality anyways. don't load acpi or apm on computers that don't support it, or ever, if you can avoid it. Don't load agp support and try to get rid of everything else you can... i highly reccomend turning of kudzu and trying not to autodetect your hardware. if any of that helps, just make sure to boot that way all the time. if not, well then best of luck. [/list]
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[axs]

well given that my kernel and initrd have to fit on a floppy disk, ive done all of that -- no power management, no fb, nothing is turned on that i _know_ isnt there (agp for instance)

what's kudzu? i dont remember seeing anything about that in the kernel, and i definitely dont have it emerged on my build system.

[wynn]

kudzu is RedHat/Fedora's hardware detection program which runs at boot. Wouldn't normally be run during a Getnoo boot — perhaps coldplug does the same thing?
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[axs]

Ah ok, well that's a userspace thing -- this thing stops before init even shows a sign of starting (when using the genkernel initrd -- if i boot to an old harddrive it fails on init too, but i assume that's because the linux install on that hdd is debian potato

[Corona688]

How much memory does this system have? Using an initrd makes it pretty high for old systems. Minimum for the initrd arrangement on the livecd is 64MB.
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