Re: Math-emu kills the kernel on Athlon64 X2

From: Linus Torvalds
Date: Mon Sep 18 2006 - 22:19:14 EST




On Tue, 19 Sep 2006, Jesper Juhl wrote:
>
> Booting with: vga=normal no387 nofxsr
> gets me no forther. These are all the messages I get:
>
> boot: 2.6.18rc7git2 vga=normal no387 nofxsr
> Loading 2.6.18rc7git2...................................
> BIOS data check successful
> Uncompressing Linux... Ok, booting the kernel.
>
> And then the system hangs and requires a power cycle.
>
> So unfortunately that does't help much :-(

Ok. The next phase is to try to figure out where it hangs, and since it
happens very early, that's most often most easily done the hard way: add
some code that reboots the machine, and if the machine hangs, you didn't
reach it.

These days there's a slightly easier approach: if you enable PM_TRACE
support (you need to enable PM and PM_DEBUG and EXPERIMENTAL to get it),
you can do

#include <resume-trace.h>

at the top of a file, and add a sprinkling of "TRACE_RESUME(x)" calls
(where "x" is some integer in the range 0-15 that you can use to save off
the iteration count in a loop, for example - leave at 0 if you're not
interested).

And then, when it hangs, once you reboot into the same kernel (without the
"no387", so that it works ;), it should tell you where the last
trace-point was fairly early in the bootup dmesg's.

(It _will_ screw up your time-of-day clock in the process, though, which
is why tracing is so hard to enable on purpose ;)

Linus
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