Re: Debian "testing" no boot

[Émeric Maschino <emeric.maschino@gmail.com>]

Hi,

> I just switched to "testing" on a HP ZX6000 (2x Itanium "Madison" CPUs) and
> when I rebooted, it failed to boot. I have a few questions:

Welcome aboard ;-)

Out of curiosity: did you switch to Wheezy from a running Squeeze
system, or did you perform a clean installation from the Debian
Installer NetInst CD? Indeed, last time I tried this route, NetInst CD
didn't even boot. I thus performed a "clean" Testing debootstrap
install on a separate HDD.

> * How do I get elilo to boot the older (2.6.x) kernel instead of the failing
> (3.2.x) kernel.

Just create the following symlinks:
- /vmlinuz.old pointing to /boot/vmlinuz-2.6
- /initrd.img.old pointing to /boot/initrd-2.6.img

(Check that /vmlinuz and /initrd.img symlinks are still pointing to
/boot/vmlinuz-3.2 and /boot/initrd-3.2.img)

Then update elilo entries with elilo -v
And reboot with kernel 2.6 passing (interactively) LinuxOLD at elilo
prompt (BUT CHECK BELOW FIRST!). If you want to boot with kernel 3.2,
pass Linux or nothing at elilo prompt.

BE CAREFUL! initramfs-tools > 0.98.8 is broken
(http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=638068). To create a
working initrd.img, follow these steps, otherwise you'll be left with
an unbootable system:
- mkdir ~/initrd
- cp /boot/initrd.img ~/initrd
- cd ~/initrd
- zcat initrd.img | cpio -i
- cp /bin/busybox bin/busybox
- rm -f initrd.img
- find . | cpio --create --format='newc' > ../initrd.img
- gzip ../initrd.img
- (as root) cp ../initrd.img /boot/initrd.img
- elilo -v

> * Is anyone else having this problem?

Yes.

> * Is there a bug filed for this?

Yes. See above.

> At this point, I don't think I've ever seen Debian "testing" boot a 3.x
> series kernel on ia64 -- anyone got this to work?

Yes. I'm running (or should I say "I'm booting"?) up-to-date Debian
Testing on my zx6000. Don't forget the initramfs-tools workaround;
it's still applicable.

However, current Testing kernel 3.2 is badly broken:
https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=42757

With kernel left alone, several other important packages are in a
really bad shape: Iceweasel
(http://lists.debian.org/debian-ia64/2012/03/msg00009.html),
JavaScript (http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=659186)
or Qt (http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=642153) to
name a few.

And because of kernel regression with cmpxchg API change, gdb is
barely usable. Quite annoying to debug further...

Hope this helps nevertheless,

     Emeric