[Gllug] Kernel Panic and 8G Limit in BIOS

[Ian Norton]

Hi, 

Sorry for the top post but my arrow keys dont work in tgssh on my palm :-p
(stupid termcap thing)

a quick glance over at google suggests it is a bios issue, if you can do a
update to redhat 8 or somthing you should be able to replace the kernel without
too much hastle, it might also be worth disabling stuff like advanced power
managment in the BIOS as this can sometimes be troublesome if the bios is a bit
flakey,

good luck

Ian

On Sat, Dec 20, 2003 at 04:53:55PM -0000, Ken Smith wrote:
> Hi All,
> 
> I'm a fairly new subscriber to this list - so this is my first post. I have
> been using Red Hat Linux on a lightly loaded server and been experimenting
> with it as a desktop environment for 2-3 years now.
> 
> Enough introductions...now my question. I recently had a disk failure on an
> elderly P166 PC running RH 7.2. It's true what that say - Linux runs until
> the hardware fails! I replaced the disk with a 20G I had, even though the
> BIOS could only see 8 G of this drive. System was rebuilt from RH 7.2 CD's
> and my backup was restored and its all running fine. To my surprise RH 7.2
> system could see all 20G of the disk.
> 
> The system runs Kernel 2.4.7-10 perfectly but when I have applied updates
> from RHN and boot 2.4.20-* I get a Kernel panic at boot up - as follows...
> 
> EIP is at [unresolved]
> {Register Dump}
> process swapper (pid:1, stackpage={hex number})
> CallTrace
> 
> Ide_config_drive_speed
> Probe_hwif
> Ideprobe_init
> stext
> Init
> Stext
> arch_kernel_thread
> init
> 
> Code: Bad EIP Value
> 
> <0> Kernel panic: Attempted to kill init
> 
> 
> My own explanation is that the later kernels are getting tripped up by the
> BIOS not being able to see beyond 8G. The system has a RH server style
> partitioning scheme with / in hda5 and /boot is in hda1. hda5 is probably
> beyond the 8G point and can't be seen when the BIOS limitations are in
> force. I don't know when in the boot procedure Linux stops using the BIOS to
> access the disks and loads its own drivers. 
> 
> Am I on the right track? If this is the case them I guess I could stick with
> 2.4.7 for now until I replace that machine with something else. Or I could
> make the system have one large partition that contains the whole filesystem
> or change the partitions around so that / and /boot are within the 8G limit.
> I could upgrade the BIOS, but the machine is so old I doubt that a new BIOS
> that will see beyond 8G is available. 
> 
> Any confirmations on this 'feature' of Kernels > 2.4.7 or ideas for simple
> fixes?
> 
> Thanks in advance
> 
> Ken
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
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