Re: [PATCH 12/12] i386 boot: Add an ELF header to bzImage

[ebiederm@xmission.com (Eric W. Biederman)]

Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org> writes:

> I tested it with Vivek's fix (below) and it still dies immediately.
>
> The grub record is
>
> title new (2.6.19-rc1)
>         root (hd0,5)
>         kernel /boot/bzImage-2.6.19-rc1 ro root=LABEL=/ rhgb vga=0x263
>         initrd /boot/initrd-2.6.19-rc1.img
>
> various binares are at http://userweb.kernel.org/~akpm/reloc/

Thanks.   

The fix was actually to remove a conflict with the other ELF notes we
are starting to generate (in the Xen context) so we can get our act
together that way.  I had no reason to suspect it would have had any
connection with your boot failure. 

I examined your bzImage and it does not have a multiboot signature,
in the first 8k.

I pointed my grub at your bzImage and it booted as far as searching
for init.  The only differences were I don't have video mode 0x263
so when prompted for something supported I told it to use video mode
0 instead.  My boot partition is (hd0,0) and is just boot, so
I changed the grub configuration to:

title Andrew
         root (hd0,0)
         kernel /bzImage-2.6.19-rc1 ro root=LABEL=/ rhgb vga=0x263
         initrd /initrd-2.6.19-rc1.img

So it feels like a subtle interaction with your hardware, or firmware.
Do things work better if you don't specify a vga=xxx mode?

This is a weird problem.

Eric