qemu testing and booting test machines with i386 kernels wasn't very successfull
with recent git kernels. I got either BUGs because of failing sysfs initialization
or oopses in kmalloc, but no user land.
I bisected it down to this commit.
To reproduce: try to boot a 386 defconfig kernel, compiled with gcc 4.1, in qemu
6cb8f91320d3e720351c21741da795fed580b21b is first bad commit
commit 6cb8f91320d3e720351c21741da795fed580b21b
Author: Christoph Lameter <clameter@xxxxxxx>
Date: Tue Jul 17 04:03:22 2007 -0700
Slab allocators: consistent ZERO_SIZE_PTR support and NULL result semantics