Kernel dies on boot (Gentoo 1.2)

Feinorgh · Posted: Mon Aug 26, 2002 7:02 am Post subject: Kernel dies on boot (Gentoo 1.2)

I have a Xeon Pentium 4 with 512 MB RAM, and the installation of Gentoo 1.2 is painless (and quick!). The problem is that when I do my first real boot into the system, the kernel dies, giving me the following error messages:

pjp · Administrator Joined: 16 Apr 2002 Posts: 20067

Are you getting to your boot manager, through it, how far along in the boot process is this?
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Feinorgh · Posted: Mon Aug 26, 2002 7:26 am Post subject:

Grub gives me the boot menu and I can see the kernel ID flash by briefly when I select the Gentoo partition to boot. However, the kernel seems to go only as far as starting to set up the processor and then it dies within a fraction of a second.
I have two harddrives installed, one with only a NTFS partition and Win2k on it, and the other drive is dedicated entirely to Gentoo according to the installation instructions (one 100 Mb root partition w/ ext3, the rest is an XFS partition... and I have ext3 and XFS support compiled into the kernel proper).

pjp · Administrator Joined: 16 Apr 2002 Posts: 20067

I'd take a look at this FAQ subject.
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Feinorgh · Posted: Mon Aug 26, 2002 7:41 am Post subject:

I did make sure that I compiled everything for i686. Since it's gcc-2.95, that's the best option I have, right? Or would it be helpful to set processor type to i386 or something more moderate in make.conf?

pjp · Administrator Joined: 16 Apr 2002 Posts: 20067

I could be way off, I'm just guessing.

Under the kernel config, which option did you select for "Processor family" under the "Processor type and features --->" menu? You might want to take a look at this thread to rebuild/inspect the kernel options.
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Feinorgh · Posted: Mon Aug 26, 2002 7:55 am Post subject:

I selected the Pentium 4 option. I've compiled the Debian 2.4.19 kernel flavour several times with both gcc-2.95.x and gcc-3.1.x and never had any problems, could it be an issue with something in the Gentoo kernel variety?

Well, I'll do some experimentation with other settings for the kernel or try another kernel flavour. Thanks for the tips and info :-)

pjp · Administrator Joined: 16 Apr 2002 Posts: 20067

Could very well be the gentoo sources. See if the vanilla sources help. Also, I found this and this (search for 'bus type' when/if you look at the pages). Also longshots. Do you have ACPI enabled or APM (or both)? Try the vanilla sources first though.
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Feinorgh · Posted: Mon Aug 26, 2002 8:15 am Post subject:

Come to think of it, ACPI might be the cause of trouble. I'll try to change some of the options there and see if it helps :-)

Looking in the kernel sources was more helpful than I thought it would be! Thank you very much :-)