Re: lilo in i386 - fail for 64bit ?
Purely for the record in the mailing list archive, should someone else
observe the same symptom ...
Alex Perry wrote:
My M6805 machine has suddenly lost the ability to boot a 64 bit kernel.
32 bit works fine, but any 64 bit or biarch kernel gets to a split
second after the decompression finishes and triggers a hard reboot. I
didn't think I'd made any changes to the system, other than upgrading to
the current Testing, so I'm wondering whether anybody else has observed
this odd phenomenon.
Somehow I managed to have "mem=nopentium" appended to all my kernels,
not just the pure32 ones. This mistake had not been committed through
lilo so, when the lilo upgrade was installed, the kernel parameters were
modified. This append has the documented effect (and is needed for
Athlon processors) in pure32. In pure64 and 32/64 kernels it seems to
be interpreted as a request for a memory size of zero, which fails.
I've noticed some installers ask the user whether they have an AMD
processor and, for an affirmative answer, will automatically add
"mem=nopentium" to the kernel parameters. It occurs to me that this
might cause people who are installing a dual boot pure32/pure64 to have
trouble booting their new biarch kernel.
While I'm on the subject, the bootloaders decide whether a kernel is a
"zimage" or a "bzimage" by inspection of the content and not by looking
at the file name. If you get a "too big" error from the bootloader, it
probably means you copied the "zimage" file from the kernel build tree
when you wanted the "bzimage".
Alex.
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