[Sussex] Kernel 2.5.47 Problems

[Steve Dobson]

Geoff

On 11/18/2002 Geoff Teale wrote:
> Let's start the new week with some problems..

To quote Captain main()wearing, "You stupid boy" :-)
 
> Yesterday I deicded to pull the kernel 2.5.47 source for a little play
> around.

Beyond here lie dragons.....

> Two problems I've found.
>
> 1. If you do a nice'd compile of the kernel at the same time as playing
>    the commercial version of tuxracer and sylpheed decides to check for
>    mail whilst you are playing then there is the occasional posibility
>    of tuxracer suffering a segfault ;)
>    Not sure that's really going to affect many people.

Did you get a core dump from tuxracer?  If so did you check it?  My guess is
that you were out of memory at the time and malloc() returned a zero which
was
not checked for my the tuxracer developer.  If my guess is correct: "Bad 
texracer developer!!!"

> 2. After compilation had finished I copied the bzImage to
>    /boot/bzImage_2_5_47 and vi'd /boot/grub/menu.lst to reflect the
>    additional kernel image.
>
> During reboot I selected the kernel 2.5.47 image from the GRUB menu and
> was almost instantly plunged into darkness.  There was no screen output,
> no disk activity, nothing.
>
> Does anyone have any clues as to what might be happening?  The image I'd
> compiled didn't have anything exceptional compiled in (in fact the only
> major difference between the options I used for my 2.5.47 and my 2.4.19
> kernels was ALSA support for intel8x0).  Thinking about it ALSA might well
> be at fault here as it doesn't seem to get on at all well with GCC 3.2.
> However I am concerned that there is absolutely no output on screen.
> Usually an ALSA failure would happen well into the boot process.

Hold on a momement - You're compiling a development kernel with GCC 3.2!!!!!
Major risk. The kernel team don't support 3.2 yet.  In fact the kernel
build (so I've been told) does build/work if you turn off or change some
of the optomisation options from 2.95.4.  Have you ruled out the compiler
as being the problem here?  If you haven't I suggest to try compiling
against GCC 2.95.4 and report back.

Steve