booting with BootX corrupts memory

Niels Kristian Bech Jensen nkbj at mail.tele.dk
Fri Aug 18 22:10:11 EST 2006


On Fri, 2006-08-18 at 14:02 +1000, Benjamin Herrenschmidt wrote:
> On Wed, 2006-08-09 at 06:00 +0200, Niels Kristian Bech Jensen wrote:
> >  On Tue, Aug  1, Olaf Hering wrote:
> > 
> > > Booting an old Mac with BootX corrupts memory, the kernel seldom gets
> > > into init. Even the built-in initramfs archive gets corrupted. So far I
> > > havent figured out where the corruption starts. The only data point so
> > > far is that a passed initrd gets overwritten with stuff that looks like
> > > part of the device-tree after the call to free_area_init_node() from
> > > paging_init(). Perhaps the virtual/real address mapping isnt handled
> > > correctly.
> > 
> > > This is broken since at least 2.6.15, 2.6.14 dies very early, 2.6.13 was
> > > still ok.
> > 
> > > Symptoms differ, depending on used .config and wether an initrd is passed.
> > 
> > I think I've been hit by this bug on my beige G3 running Ubuntu Edgy.
> > 
> > When booting with initrd the boot process stops before any kernel output (CONFIG_BOOTX_TEXT is not enabled).
> > Booting without initrd works fine - at least until it cannot find the root filesystem driver. ;-)
> 
> Does this patch helps ?
> 
Yes, it fixes the problem for me. Thanks.

-- 
Niels Kristian Bech Jensen

Stop software piracy --- use free software.




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