I have been trying to put everybody's suggestions on compiling
the kernel. Now, I have traced the problem to the initialization of
modutils in in rcS. Basically, depmod -a > /dev/null segfaults and then
a variety of kernel not being able to use NULL pointers pop up,
eventually halting the system.
If I boot with the old kernel, and I try to the depmod line, it
works fine. In fact, if I issue now
# depmod -a 2.2.14 -F /boot/System.map-2.2.14, I get
/lib/modules/2.2.14/fs/nls_iso8859-1.o:
/lib/modules/2.2.14/fs/fat.o:
/lib/modules/2.2.14/fs/vfat.o: /lib/modules/2.2.14/fs/fat.o
/lib/modules/2.2.14/fs/nls_iso8859-15.o:
/lib/modules/2.2.14/net/rtl8139.o:
/lib/modules/2.2.14/net/dummy.o:
/lib/modules/2.2.14/scsi/scsi_mod.o:
/lib/modules/2.2.14/scsi/sd_mod.o: /lib/modules/2.2.14/scsi/scsi_mod.o
/lib/modules/2.2.14/scsi/ppa.o: /lib/modules/2.2.14/misc/parport.o \
/lib/modules/2.2.14/scsi/scsi_mod.o
/lib/modules/2.2.14/block/ide-cd.o: /lib/modules/2.2.14/cdrom/cdrom.o
/lib/modules/2.2.14/cdrom/cdrom.o:
/lib/modules/2.2.14/misc/parport_pc.o: /lib/modules/2.2.14/misc/parport.o
/lib/modules/2.2.14/misc/esssolo1.o: /lib/modules/2.2.14/misc/soundcore.o
/lib/modules/2.2.14/misc/lp.o: /lib/modules/2.2.14/misc/parport.o
/lib/modules/2.2.14/misc/parport.o:
/lib/modules/2.2.14/misc/soundcore.o:
which suggests that the module dependencies have been calculated without
any problem whatsoever. My /etc/modules file is
# /etc/modules: kernel modules to load at boot time.
noauto
vfat
esssolo1
serial
parport
parport_pc
rtl8139
so all modules here are present on the above file. I could really skip
the noauto stuff, but it *shouldn't* harm. As for the kernel compilation
line, this goes as follows:
-D__KERNEL__ -Wall -Wstrict-prototypes -O2 -fomit-frame-pointer -pipe
-fno-streght-reduce -mpreferred-stack-boundary=2 -m486 -malign-loop=2
-malign-jumps=2 -malign-functions=2 -DCPU=586
The CPU is an AMD Athlon at 550 MHz, so I *guess* I have the
right DCPU option. I do a make dep ; make clean ; make zImage, copy the
resultant zImage to /boot/vmlinuz-2.2.14 and then run lilo
appropriately.
And it doesn't work! I'm getting somewhat frustrated by all
this, it used to work first time on the other computers!
Thanks for your help
José
--
José L Gómez Dans PhD student
Radar & Communications Group
Department of Electronic Engineering
University of Sheffield UK
