Bug#299731: kernel-image-2.6-686-smp: SMP kernel causes krenele panic during boot

[Matt Taggart <taggart@debian.org>]

Aprotim Sanyal writes...,

> Tested on both testing and unstable.  On my (old) dual-P3 system (Asus CUV4X-
> D), booting the SMP kernels for 2.6.8 or 2.6.10 causes a hand on boot, 
> with the message "Kernel panic: attempted to kill init!" shortly after printi
> ng out some IDE bud information.  Non-SMP kernels boot normally (though, 
> of course, without SMP support).  Adding "noapic" or "acpi=no" to the boot li
> ne in either LILO or GRUB makes a difference to this problem.

Hmm, interesting problem I think more info is needed.

Could you capture and send the boot logs of the success and failure cases 
using another machine and a serial cable? Having those two files to diff (I 
use tkdiff) is often useful in finding the problem.

Here's what I do:
Connect the two machines together via a null modem cable
Setup an additional entry in the bootloader to use serial console with
  your desired settings for the serial port you're using (I add
  "console=ttyS0,38400n8" to the cmdline for my setup). For a standard
  Debian grub setup I added this line
  "# altoptions=(serial) console=ttyS0,38400n8" and ran
  update-grub. This creates a serial boot option for each of my
  installed kernels which is pretty nice. For lilo you can just create
  additional images adding the console option above.
Run something like minicom or cu on the logging machine and configure to
  use the correct serial port and your desired settings
Turn on logging in that program (minicom has a way to do this, for cu
  you might want to run within script(1) ) 
Reboot the machine and select the serial console boot method
When done logging (after the hang or successful boot) close the logfile
  to ensure that and buffered lines are flushed to the log file
  (same command in minicom as to start logging IIRC).
Send the logs to the BTS as mime attachments.

Thanks,

-- 
Matt Taggart
taggart@debian.org