Odd kernel problems

[gir]

My mac's having some really odd problems:
1) The system clock is never able to sync with the hardware clock. This fails both on boot and on halt. Manually running `sudo /sbin/hwclock --{hctosys,systohc} --utc` returns the error "Timed out waiting for time change."

2) Whenever I halt or reboot the system the kernel panics. It will haing at the "Rebooting system" or "Halting system" message after it stops all of the services and changes to the appropriate runlevel. After 30 seconds or so the kernel panics and spews a lot of information talking about disconnected queue entries and SCB lists/info and prints "Kernel Panic: Loop 1" as the last line before it states that it'll reboot in 180 seconds (and never does)

3) `sudo ybin` returns
"Failed to initialize HFS working directories: Permission denied
ybin: /dev/sda4 appears to have never had a bootstrap installed, please run mkofboot"

while `sudo mkofboot -v` return
"mkofboot: Finding OpenFirmware device path to `/dev/sda4'...

mkofboot: Create hfs filesystem on /dev/sda4? [y/N] y
mkofboot: Creating HFS filesystem on /dev/sda4...
Failed to initialize HFS working directories: Permission denied
mkofboot: HFS filesystem creation failed!"

Now, I did upgrade to 2.4.20 which might have caused those problems but I have since downgraded to the 2.4.19-r6 kernel. I have rtc support enabled but don't have the extended rtc support enabled. Other than that kenel switch I have stuck with the recommeneded upgrades as done by a `sudo emerge -u world`. Anyone have and ideas what might be up with my system?

[Hasimir]

Good one...if I should shoot a first arrow into the blue:
First I would blame it all on RTC... try a kernel with rtc as a module or even without...
Second guess is about the hardware:
How old is your Mac (and what kind of...)? Internal battery still working if you pull the power plug for at last half an hour?
The state of your Macs battery does not matter now, but in the future...

It looks a little like you are having a kind of ROM problem, so my first advice would be to reset (apple-opt-p-r) the PRAM. If this does not solve the problem (assuming battery status o.k.), take out the battery for at last half an hour (there are some bytes in the PROM [64 or 256 if I remember correctly] which are not reset), re-insert it and start-up in MacOS8-9 and run the Apple system profiler..

[gir]

Well, it turns out that the 2.4.20 kernel was to blame for all of this. I rebuilt the 2.4.19 kernel a second time, copied it over to boot, and ran ybin to make sure that everything was happy with the bootloader partition. ybin returned errors (as I expected) but I rebooted anyway (keep in mind that all of this was done on top of the 2.4.19 kernel that I had build after I had decided that 2.4.20 was evil). Since my bootloader partition gor fubar'd with my ybin command, the Mac (B/W G3, btw) booted off of the install cd. After chrooting into my disk and fixing the bootloader I decided, since it would be very simple to unmount all of my disks when I'm running off of the boot cd, that I would run an e2fsck and verify that all of my disks were fine. Dispite the fact that I have ext3 filesystems the fsck found a couple of errors on a few of my partitions.

After a reboot, everything worked fine.

Now, as to what the actual cause of the problem was, I have no idea. I'm not as familiar with the yaboot bootloader as I am with (say) grub so I don't know if yaboot is like lilo in the sense that, after every kernel install you need to run ybin to update symbol information, or if it's more like grub in that it is intelligent enough to find the kernel on its own given a path to the kernel. If yaboot is more like lilo it's possible that my bootloader partition was never properly updated with the 2.4.19 kernel information or some other strange thing was happening. It's also possible that the disk errors were the source of the problem. Either way, things are happy now...

[rac]

yaboot is closer to LILO: you need to run ybin after changing kernels.
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