[PlanetCCRMA] Kernel Panic

[Mark Knecht]

Fernando,
   While you were away I made some progress on this problem, and got some
info from the more knowledgeable Redhat users on their install lists about
what might be causing the problem. Where this seems to have ended up is
here:

1) The motherboard I'm using in this case is an Asus A7V266-E. It has an
onboard chipset EIDE controller, but also has a secondary ATA-100 controller
also

2) My system hard drive is attached to the chipset controller\

3) With the standard RH 7.3 kernel the drive is seen as

Partition check:
hda: hda1 hda2 < hda5 hda6 hda7 hda8 >

and then boots fine.

4) With the Planet 2.4.19.ll kernel the drive is seen as:

hde: hde1 hde2 < hde5 hde6 hde7 hde8 >

and then fails to boot saying that it can't find hde to boot from.


5) The grub config file looks like:

default=1
timeout=10
splashimage=(hd0,6)/boot/grub/splash.xpm.gz
title Red Hat Linux (2.4.19-1.ll)
        root (hd0,6)
        kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.4.19-1.ll ro root=/dev/hda7
title Red Hat Linux (2.4.18-3)
        root (hd0,6)
        kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.4.18-3 ro root=/dev/hda7
title DOS
        rootnoverify (hd0,0)
        chainloader +1

I found that if I changed the 2.4.19.ll boot line to:

        kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.4.19-1.ll ro root=/dev/hde7

then the machine will boot, but unfortunately can't find the swap partition
at hda5.


   The Redhat guys suggested that we look at how the kernel was configured
with respect to how it sees additional EIDE controllers. They make the point
that there is an option called "CONFIG_BLK_DEV_OFFBOARD" that changes the
order the system sees the onboard vs. off-board controllers. If your kernel
sees the off-board controller before it sees the chipset, then the
misoperation actually makes sense.

   While this makes sense to me, I have also run your kernel on the A7V133,
which also has a second ATA controller, so it may be a chipset specific
issue.

   I hope this helps you. I am very willing to build my own kernel to debug
this if you could give me a hand getting set up to duplicate what you've
done. As you may remember, I was also interested in XFS support, so I could
build that in and try it out also.

Thanks in advance,
Mark

-----Original Message-----
From: planetccrma-admin@ccrma.Stanford.EDU
[mailto:planetccrma-admin@ccrma.Stanford.EDU]On Behalf Of Fernando Pablo
Lopez-Lezcano
Sent: Saturday, November 23, 2002 8:40 AM
To: Mark Knecht
Cc: Planet-CCRMA
Subject: Re: [PlanetCCRMA] Kernel Panic


> kmod: Failed to exec /sbin/modprobe -s -k block-major-3, errno=2
> VFS: cannot open root deice "hda5" oe 03:05
> Please append a correct "root" boot option
> Kernel panic: VFS: Unable to mount root FS on 03:05

Most probably the ll kernel is not able to deal with the particular hard
disk controller you are using on that machine. That message means that the
kernel could not access the main "root" partition.

>    What can we do to debug this and find out what's wrong?

Not much right now, I'm leaving on a trip (in one hour and I'm not done)
and will be back on the 2nd. I'll probably read mail but I don't know how
much time I'll have to actually answer it :-)

You could rebuild the alsa driver source rpm so that at least you can
temporarily use the redhat kernel with the alsa drivers. There's a small
section on that in the planet pages (not very detailed I'm afraid).

>    Thanks in advance for your help. I didn't think this was going to be
the
> way my weekend started.

Sorry about this, I have to look again at what to do with the kernel
(newer ones are killed by jack).

-- Fernando

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