Re: Linux 2.6.33-rc3, rc2 regression at boot

[Gene Heskett]

On Tuesday 05 January 2010, Linus Torvalds wrote:
>It's been quiet due to the holidays, so -rc3 is reasonably small despite
>being a few days over the normal one-week mark. And most of the changes
>are pretty trivial, although both ext4 and reiserfs had some trouble in
>-rc2, hopefully all fixed now.
>
>The bulk of the patches are some SH defconfig updates (40%), but ignoring
>those we have the normal "half drivers, half everything else" pattern. On
>the driver front, the perhaps most notable change is not so much a code
>change, but the small change of marking the "new" firewire stack as being
>the recommended one.
>
>Wireless drivers, regular network drivers, filesystems, input layer..
>
>And here's to hoping one reason it's been quiet is that it's actually been
>fairly stable. Give it a try,
>
>		Linus

[...]

I didn't see anything here, but on looking at the ChangeLog for rc1, I see a 
lot of stuff fiddling with firmware.  On my phenom x4, I get this very early in 
the boot:
[    0.558368] Unpacking initramfs...
[    0.648644] Freeing initrd memory: 3431k freed
[    0.651635] platform microcode: firmware: requesting amd-ucode/microcode_amd.bin
[   60.646738] microcode: failed to load file amd-ucode/microcode_amd.bin
[   60.646858] microcode: CPU0: patch_level=0x1000065
[   60.646977] microcode: CPU1: patch_level=0x1000065
[   60.647099] microcode: CPU2: patch_level=0x1000065
[   60.647218] microcode: CPU3: patch_level=0x1000065

Note the time, it kills quite close to a whole minute there, which at first 
would appear to be because there is not yet a mounted /lib filesystem to suck
it from.  I didn't build an rc1, but rc2 also suffers from this. 2.6.32.2 does
not do this although its firmware request takes place at the same point.
So it doesn't look like it is the lack of a mounted filesystem after all.

FWIW, because it was a hot reboot, the patch_level reported is the correct
level.

I am also seeing some complaints about my Audigy2 sound card, but what I saw
during the boot, never made it to the messages log.  Something about guessing
at the proper config, but I did hear kde sign on when x started.

Thanks Linus.

-- 
Cheers, Gene
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
 soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)

Insomnia isn't anything to lose sleep over.
--
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
More majordomo info at  http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at  http://www.tux.org/lkml/