Hi,

I am having troubles getting any recent kernel to boot successfully
on one of my machines, a generic 2.6GHz P4 box with HT enabled
running an updated Fedora Core 3 distro. This is present in
2.6.12-rc6. It does not manifest itself with the Fedora Core
kernels which have identical initrd contents as far as the
init script and the set of modules included goes.

The problem manifests itself as various undefined symbols from
module loads.  Here is the relevant section from the init script:

echo Starting udev
/sbin/udevstart
echo -n "/sbin/hotplug" > /proc/sys/kernel/hotplug
echo "Loading scsi_mod.ko module"
insmod /lib/scsi_mod.ko
echo "Loading sd_mod.ko module"
insmod /lib/sd_mod.ko
echo "Loading libata.ko module"
insmod /lib/libata.ko
echo "Loading ata_piix.ko module"
insmod /lib/ata_piix.ko
echo "Loading ieee1394.ko module"
insmod /lib/ieee1394.ko
echo "Loading ohci1394.ko module"
insmod /lib/ohci1394.ko
echo "Loading sbp2.ko module"
insmod /lib/sbp2.ko
echo "Loading dm-mod.ko module"
insmod /lib/dm-mod.ko
echo "Loading jbd.ko module"
insmod /lib/jbd.ko
echo "Loading ext3.ko module"
insmod /lib/ext3.ko
echo "Loading dm-mirror.ko module"
insmod /lib/dm-mirror.ko
echo "Loading dm-zero.ko module"
insmod /lib/dm-zero.ko
echo "Loading dm-snapshot.ko module"
insmod /lib/dm-snapshot.ko
/sbin/udevstart

The failures are different on different boots, sometimes the ata_piix
module cannot find symbols from libata, sometimes ext3 cannot find jbd
symbols, sometimes dm modules cannot find things from dm-mod, usually
it is a combination of these. End result is a panic when it cannot
find the root device.

 From the behavior, it appears that a module load is returning
control to user space before the previous one has got its symbols
loaded.

The loadable module section of my config file looks like this:

CONFIG_MODULES=y
CONFIG_MODULE_UNLOAD=y
# CONFIG_MODULE_FORCE_UNLOAD is not set
CONFIG_OBSOLETE_MODPARM=y
# CONFIG_MODVERSIONS is not set
# CONFIG_MODULE_SRCVERSION_ALL is not set
CONFIG_KMOD=y
CONFIG_STOP_MACHINE=y

Since the fedora core kernels work consistently, this is either
something about my config triggering this, or something
redhat has in their kernels - I suspect the former.

My module tools are "module-init-tools version 3.1-pre5"
which seems to be as far as Redhat has updated their rpms
to. I will try a later version of these to see if it makes
any difference.

Complete .config attached.

Steve