Re: loading minix fails


Zack <goldszspam@xxxxxxxxx> writes:

Markus E Leypold wrote:
Which hardware do you
run? Did you choose 8mb or 16mb setup?
I have 1GB of memory, I'm using my standard PC, nothing is that old.
I tried both the 8 and 16MB options.

:-).

Perhaps it's too much memory :-). No -- only joking.


Try switching to soft scrolling (that WAS a F-key, you'll find
it in the docs somewhere) and try to use ALT-F1 ... ALT-F4 to switch
between virtual consoles and see if something happens.

What is soft scrolling?

Not using the scrolling mechanism in the card (yes things like this
existed :-). There was a F-Key to turn scrolling to "soft" because
some not quite compatible cards didn't work with the Minix driver in
this respect.

Attempting to switch between virtual consoles
didn't do anything.

Shouldn't at least the terminal prompts change?

There is another F-key which dumps the processes to the terminal
(F3?). Have a look into usage.txt about that and try it: If it works,
the console is not completely f***ed up yet. If not, the kernel has
either died for good or the console is shot. That at least would show
the the problem is not one of just the getty's not worling, but
somewhere deeper.


What do you really mean by "hang"? No error message etc? And what is
the last message you actually see on the screen? Does the screen
content go away or is it just that you don't get any output any more?

There were no error messages. The last thing I saw was the line that
shows the addresses and stack for init.

Im not sure what the state of things is, but in the past drivers
talked to the console at least a bit. So that you only see the initial
kernel message (or is it from the loader? -- At least before
everything goes into protected mode) would indicate a deeper
problem. Your CPU or chipset don't like this Minix version.

A couple blank lines and then a blinking cursor. The screen wasn't
cleared, I could still see the table of everything that was loaded,
and where I was given an option for 8 or 16MB. No more output came.

The option probably comes form the boot monitor (it is asked before
the kernel is initialised).

I have gotten around it by using the book version but I still can't get
the one from the website to run.

Without help from someone who's actually knowledgable about this, we
won't be able to resolve this. Mind: All my advice on 3.x is pretty
generic, based mostly on what I read here and what I knew from 2.x,
assuming that some things didn't change in 3.x. But this looks (a)
eminently solvable and (b) like something someone of the development
team should be interested in: It looks as if something has been
changed in the kernel initialization or the loader from 3.1.0 to 3.1.2
which keeps it from running with some new chipsets or CPUs.

If you want to become a "real kernel hacker"[tm] cou could try diffing
the kernel and boot loader sources of the 2 versions against each
other and look what has changed.

Regards -- Markus

.

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