Re: Maxine status?

[Karsten Merker <karsten@excalibur.cologne.de>]

On Tue, Sep 10, 2002 at 07:07:45PM +0200, Ulrich Teichert wrote:

> >You can get the r3k-kn02 installer tftpimage and try how far you come.
> >Usually it crashes after displaying the splash screen. After that,
> >debugging gets difficult, as the kernel crashes without any visible 
> >oops or panic. dbootstrap (a part of bootfloppies) somehow seems to 
> >triggers the bug, so you might have some luck tracing dbootstrap. 
> 
> Does this bug look like:
> 
> >>boot 3/tftp console=ttyS0   
[kernel messages snipped]
> serial console detected.  Disabling virtual terminals.
> init started:  BusyBox v0.60.3-pre (2002.01.21-23:16+0000) multi-call binary
> [that's it, it then hangs/crashes/whatever]

Yes. 

> on a Personal DECstation 5k/33 with serial console and otherwise
> working fine with a headless nfs-root. Where and what should I start
> to debug?

We had tried to find the program triggering the bug by putting some
debug output into programs called from inittab and it seems that it
is the last step in initab (dbootstrap, the "real" installer program),
that causes the kernel to hang. You could try filling it with debug
output to find the exact point where the crash occurs.
It is btw. a real crash - if you boot with init=/bin/sh, configure the
network and manually single-step through inittab, you can see that 
pinging the box works, but in the moment you start dbootstrap, there
are no replies to pings anymore, so the kernel is really dead at that
point of time.

The boot-floppies cvs tree (including dbootstrap) is available by

cvs -d :pserver:anonymous@cvs.debian.org:/debian-boot co boot-floppies

if you would like to try your luck.

HTH,
Karsten
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