Fedora's vmlinuz broken with mkelfimage
 

https://fedorahosted.org/k12linux/wiki/Notes/Coreboot
Something about Fedora's vmlinuz fails to load the initrd when it is
wrapped with mkelfimage. Full details at this page.


mkelfimage is necessary to wrap the vmlinuz and initrd into a single
bootable image if your hardware uses coreboot. qemu network booting
exhibits the same broken behavior, so this should be easy for others to
test without special coreboot hardware.


My latest theory: Something about how the Fedora kernel is configured or
built made it incompatible with mkelfimage. Ubuntu's recent kernels
work while our Fedora kernels from F8 (and possibly all the way back to
2006 as OLPC encountered) are broken.


http://people.redhat.com/wtogami/temp/config-2.6.24-16-generic
Here is Ubuntu's kernel config file if anyone wants to compare it.

Any ideas?

Warren Togami
wtogami@redhat.com

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Fedora's vmlinuz broken with mkelfimage
 

Jerry Vonau wrote:


I downloaded and booted the kernel & initrd that you have linked to
using grub as the boot loader. The boot process doesn't show that
error(it's a kernel message), it finds that the initrd.img is an
initramfs and loads. mkelfimage is hardcoded for a 8 MB initial ramdisk
(it's in the man page), your initrd has an uncompressed size over that.
Perhaps you need to pass --ramdisk-base= to change the size in mkelfimage.

hope my 2 cents is useful,


*gasp*

I tried --ramdisk-base and it does indeed make it boot. I don't quite
understand it because Ubuntu's initrd is definitely larger than 8MB as well.


I'm guessing 16MB is a safe number, because frees the memory after initrd?

Anyway, thanks very much.

Warren Togami
wtogami@redhat.com

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