Re: boot...reboot...reboot...

[David Reviejo <dreviejo@arrakis.es>]

On Tue, Nov 09, 1999 at 01:04:34AM -0600, Michael Haarman wrote:
> On reboot, the POST happens, LILO (there is no Windows here, thank you)
> and the Loading Linux . . . . . . . . . . .
> 

I had the same problem on my Satellite 2560. This is from the "Linux on the
Toshiba Tecra series laptops" page:

The Linux installation disks created from the Suse Linux 4.2 CD-ROM
(Slackware-descendant) or the Debian 1.2 distribution won't boot due to their
use of the new "bzImage" format for kernels. With this format, you can have
larger kernel images, because they are loaded into memory > 1MB. (See the LILO
documentation for details.) Unfortunately, this results in an immediate hard
reset just after loading the kernel and before printing "Uncompressing". 


And this is from the kernel-pakage README:

Tecras and other notebooks 
--------------------------
          (Many thanks to Philip Hands <phil@hands.com> and
           Avery Pennarun <apenwarr@worldvisions.ca> for this explanation)

Tecras and other notebooks, and some PCs have a problem where they
fail to flush the cache when switching on the a20 gate (IIRC), which
is provoked by bzImage kernels, but not by zimage kernels. 

bzImage files are actually "big zImage" not "bzipped Image".  bzImage
kernels can be as large as you like, but because they need to decompress
into extended memory, they aggravate this problem.  zImage kernels just
compress into conventional memory, so they never need to touch the a20 gate,
but they hit the 640k limit.

There are two solutions that I know of:

  1) apply a patch, which flushes the cache.  Unfortunately this
     causes other machines to crash so is not universally applicable
     (hence the tecra disks being segragated from the mainstream)

  2) build a zimage, rather than bzimage kernel.  This seems to get
     round the problem. use the --zimage option to make-kpkg, or even
     set this as the default in /etc/kernel-pkg.conf.


If this is your problem, the kernel image from the Slink second CD is a zImage;
you can use this until you build one by your own.

-- 
David