Re: Occasional kernel panic...

[Stefan O'Rear <stefanor@cox.net>]

On Tue, Sep 14, 2004 at 09:17:57AM -0700, Russel Hill wrote:
> We routinely build ISO's and occasionally one fails to boot (with a 
> kernel panic).  I've attached a screenshot of the kernel panic.
> 
> The ISO's are all built using script files and they are always built the 
> same way.  They may include new packages but the boot image is built the 
> same way each time (using mkbimage).
> 
> The boot image appears to contain all the appropriate files.  The only 
> observable differences occur in the initrd.img and in boot/grub/stage2.
> 
> I've loop mounted both good and bad initrds and they appear to be good, 
> though the executables do report differences (I assume these are date 
> stamps and such).
> 
> The grub/stage2 files are the same size but have differences (or so diff 
> says).  These differences are similar (a 9 or 10 byte difference) 
> whether we diff between good images or a good and a bad image.
> 
> How would one diagnose this?  How would one automatically detect this? 
> Any assistance would be appreciated?

> smc-ultra.c: No ISAPnP cards found, trying standard ones...
> RAMDISK driver initialized: 16 RAM disks of 2048K size 1024 blocksize
> Intel(R) PRO/1000 Network Driver - version 5.2.20-k1
> Copyright (c) 1999-2003 Intel Corporation.
> pcnet32.c:v1.27a 10.02.2002 tsbogend@alpha.franken.de
> ns83820.c: National Semiconductor DP83820 10/100/1000 driver.
> Uniform Multi-Platform E-IDE driver Revision: 7.00beta4-2.4
> ide: Assuming 50MHz system bus speed for PIO modes; override with idebus=xx
> hdb: Generic 1234, ATAPI CD/DVD-ROM drive
> ide0 at 0x1f0-0x1f7,0x3f6 on irq 14
> NET4: Linux TCP/IP 1.0 for NET4.0
> IP Protocols: ICMP, UDP, TCP, IGMP
> IP: routing cache hash table of 512 buckets, 4Kbytes
> TCP: Hash tables configured (established 2048 bind 2048)
> NET4: Unix domain sockets 1.0/SMP for Linux NET4.0.
> RAMDISK: Compressed image found at block 0
> Freeing initrd memory: 1076k freed
> VFS: Mounted root (ext2 filesystem).
> Freeing unused kernel memory: 116k freed
> attempt to access beyond end of device
> 01:00: rw=0, want=2050, limit=2048
> attempt to access beyond end of device
> 01:00: rw=0, want=2050, limit=2048
> Kernel panic: No init found.  Try passing init= option to kernel.

Size. The bad initrds are more than 2MB uncompressed. Try passing
ramdisk_size=8192 to the kernel prompt. (Loop mounting won't detect
this).


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