hangs after "Freeing unused kernel memory"

[Siva Prasad]

Hi Linas,

I found it hard way. You are correct. I am just loosing the console, and
all the programs are executing fine. I could put a printk in execve and
see all the programs executing (printk's work fine).

I am using a PowerPC based system with my own kernel and initrd (not
RedHat system). Can you please elaborate on what exactly you are
suggesting me to do. Are you trying to copy /dev/<files> from build
machine to the ramdisk? I am confused.

Further, I could not find /dev/hv* files in any of the systems. What are
they for?

You also mentioned about tweaking initrd and udev. Appreciate some help
with this console loosing. 

Thanks in advance for your help.

- Siva


-----Original Message-----
From: Linas Vepstas [mailto:linas at austin.ibm.com] 
Sent: Monday, November 19, 2007 9:52 AM
To: Siva Prasad
Cc: linuxppc-embedded at ozlabs.org; linuxppc-dev at ozlabs.org
Subject: Re: hangs after "Freeing unused kernel memory"

On Thu, Nov 15, 2007 at 04:00:09PM -0800, Siva Prasad wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> This sounds like a familiar problem, but could not get answers in
posts
> that came up in google search.
> 
> My system hangs after printing the message "Freeing unused kernel
> memory". It should execute init after that, but not sure what exactly
is
> happening. Appreciate if some one can throw few ideas to try out.

It might not be a hang, it might be simply that you loose the console.
If this is a redhat system, and you didn't tweak initrd and udev just 
right, this can happen.

Try doing this:

      mount --bind / /mnt
      cp -a /dev/null /mnt/dev
      cp -a /dev/console /mnt/dev
      cp -a /dev/hv* /mnt/dev
      umount /mnt

> Seems it is actually hanging when it makes the call "
> run_init_process(ramdisk_execute_command)" in init/main.c

Then again, your initrd might be corrupted.

--linas