Re: Bad news

Linus Torvalds (torvalds@cs.helsinki.fi)
Fri, 20 Sep 1996 13:22:32 +0300 (EET DST)


On Fri, 20 Sep 1996, Dr. Werner Fink wrote:
>
> Hmm --- I've some trouble with 2.0.20 too ... and absolute no trouble
> with 2.0.0, 2.0.9, 2.0.11, and 2.0.18
>
> 2.0.20 will die on first disk access (partition check or start of
> /sbin/init) within an oops

Can you copy down the oops? You'd need to do it by hand, and it's a very
boring thing to do, I know, but it might be instructive.

> This oops occures on an i486-PCI-System with saturn II Rev 4 (without bug),
> ncr53c810, and an amd586-p75 ... maybe I should check this with my old
> amd486dx4-100.
>
> On other systems on work (all i586) there are no problems with ncr53c810
> and 53c7,8xx driver .... timing problem?

Or a NULL pointer dereference that isn't seen by the Pentium machines because
the pentium 4MB pages hide the problem (the kernel NULL address is actually
mapped to physical address 0 on Pentiums). You can try this by undefining
"USE_PENTIUM_MM" in asm-i386/pgtable.h and see if the pentiums crash..

Linus