System freeze on boot solution!

blk_jack · Last edited by blk_jack on Mon May 20, 2002 10:16 am; edited 1 time in total

I recently put Gentoo on a harddrive which I intend to transfer to a p166mmx. The machine I installed it on is a pII 400. I compiled everything with the -mcpu=i686 flag and I compiled the kernel as a Pentium-MMX.

However when I initially booted the system froze after "Freeing unused kernel memory". So I did a little reading and found that this type of freeze is sometimes found when a kernel is compiled with flags that pertain to a higher CPU. ie: If I compiled the kernel with -march i686 and I intended to run the drive off a p166mmx.

So I recompiled the kernel with march=i386 after reading the help file on the cpu-type option in the kernel. This option said it would work on all x86 cpu types, but when I put the harddrive back in the p166mmx it continues to freeze after "Freeing unused kernel memory..". I've recompiled the entire system twice already and the kernel countless times. ANY help or suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

FINITE · Guru Joined: 10 May 2002 Posts: 449

How far into the install of gentoo did you get before transfering it over to the lesser system?

Guest · Posted: Sun May 19, 2002 9:39 pm Post subject:

blk_jack · Posted: Sun May 19, 2002 10:38 pm Post subject:

Just so everyone knows, the system freezes either as it's loading INIT or just before. As I said, it displays "Freeing unused kernel memory 208k" (or similar) just before it halts. However I can still type and scroll back (shift-pgup) from there.

The only thing I can think of is if it's LILO or maybe the fact that my root partition is ext3. My boot partition used to be ext3 too, but I read somewhere about that having problems so I converted it to ext2 but it still crashes.

blk_jack · Posted: Mon May 20, 2002 10:27 am Post subject:

Hey all! I have good news!

After days & days of recompiles, search engines, posts on this forum, mailinglists, and well, general hell. HOWEVER!!! After a few trail & error methods I managed to get it all working and it's working very nicely.

Despite documentation you cannot compile the entire system as -mcpu=i686 and have it boot without problems. At one point my system was compiled like this and it would freeze right after "Freeing unused kernel memory XXXk" even with the kernel selected as 586.

However I got the harddrive back under the initial install system and selected march=i586 flag(s) for compilation. After a recompile of baselayout, sh-utils and glibc I put the harddrive BACK into the target machine and it booted beautifully.

Everything appears to be working now and the system is up & running. Hopefully this little post here will save some other poor soul cross compiling a Gentoo install from another (faster) machine a lot of headache and time!