2.3.48 hang on starting init?

[Gabriel Paubert]

	Hi,

> Yet another quirk I've found with 2.3:
>
> Sometimes, when booting, the kernel would hang just after freeing init
> kernel memory, before starting init.
>
> I've booted 4-5 times now without a problem, but it seems to happen
> every time when the root partition is not marked as clean (i.e. after a
> crash).

I saw something similar with 2.3.4x up to 2.3.45, then I could not test
later versions because they would not boot with root on NFS. The pattern
was that a shutdown -r would always hang but it would work if power was
cycled for some mysterious reason. This was solved this by clearing all
free memory in my bootloader (on MVME2400/MVME2600 boards).

Now I'm happily running 2.3.50 (Linus'tree with some patches available on
my ftp server) without any problems, but I did not try to remove my hack.

> It seems to be related either to init not starting, or to the kernel
> not being able to deal with the non-clean root partition. The problem
> appears way before fsck gets a chance at the partition.

Since I was exclusively testing wit hroot on nfs, non clean rooot
partition is not an option ;-)

> Anybody seen something similar? Any idea what I should look at?
>
> Hmmm, my init is 2.74 from my old R4 install; maybe I should give R5 or
> 2000 a try?

I'm using init from R5.

	Gabriel.

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