Hangs after "Loading" but before "Uncompressing"

[Markley, Todd]

Chris:
       I am not sure if you have been following this thread of
messages. Some of this information I have included before.

   American Megatrends AMIBIOS 6/30/98
   3dfx voodoo3 2000 PCI
   ADM K6/2 350
   64Meg
   Maxtor 6.1Gig IDE

Now for some debugging facts:
   1) The system will boot the RedHat install kernel 5.2,6.0, & 6.1
      without any problems.
   2) When I replace the AMD K6/2 350 with a Cyrix 6x86 266 then
      the problem linux kernel boots fine.
   3) When I replace the AMD K6/2 350 with another AMD K6/2 350
      the kernel hangs as reported before (no change).
   4) I have swapped the video card with a Trident SVGA card that
      works fine in another linux system, and the kernel still
      hangs.
   5) Thinking that I had some kind of "speed" bug in my
      motherboard I under clocked the AMD K6/2 350 at 266,
      (same as the Cyrix that works), but it still hangs the
       same way.
   6) This system runs Win95,98, and MSDOS6.22 without any
      problems (this isn't saying much, but I thought I
      should include it).

Now I am still not sure that I don't have a hardware problem, knowing
that it can be very hard to prove with this kind of hang. Some of
my questions are:

      A) If my hardware is bad then why does the RedHat install
         kernel boot just fine? What can be different with that
         kernel build?
      B) If the "int $0x10" is using the part of the BIOS that
         comes from the video card then when I swapped the
         other good video card in shouldn't it affect the
         problem?
      C) If this problem is caused by my
         video/motherboard/shadow-config then why does it
         work with the Cyrix CPU?

If I had another motherboard then I would swap it, but I don't
want to spend any more money on this hardware. I don't even have
a strong idea that this is a hardware problem. You say that the
video shadow settings might affect this problem? I may try
adjusting some of those in the BIOS. I am open to any other
input or ideas.

Thanks

Todd Markley

-----Original Message-----
From: Chris Noe
To: Markley, Todd
Sent: 1/30/00 4:11 PM
Subject: RE: Hangs after "Loading" but before "Uncompressing"

On Sun, 30 Jan 2000, Markley, Todd wrote:

>  Dick:
>        I installed version 2.3.40 of the linux kernel and
> installed your patch. The result is that it still hangs
> the same way. So now I have continued to add debugging
> prints to video.S to find the exact location of the hang.
> The result is that it locks up in the "basic_detect:"
> routine at the first "int $0x10". It looks to me like
> this routine is trying to identify the type of display.
> So I tried to help out a little by changing the subroutine
> to read this way:
> 
> basic_detect:
>         movb    $0x1a, %al                      # 1a means VGA...
>         incb    adapter
>         incb    adapter
>         ret
> 
> 
> If I understand what the routine is doing then this should
> return as if a VGA was detected. (I may have missed something
> here, but it boots ok on another system.) The kernel will now
> do the "vga=ask", and I can select mode zero. Next the system
> hangs in the "restore_screen:" subroutine. Do you have any new
> ideas? Is this "int $0x10" function in the motherboard BIOS or
> in the video card BIOS? Could this problem have anything to do
> with video BIOS shadow settings?
> 
> Todd Markley

To answer your question, the int 0x10 is a video BIOS call, and thus
could
be easily affected by shadow settings. It is almost certainly a bios
problem, simply because everything is kosher *except* when the actual
interrupt is given. Hmm. Very interesting, to say the least. Could you
give me some specs on your machine? CPU, BIOS version, video card
make/model, etc.

Changing basic_detect like that was a fine way to debug it, and my guess
is that when it hangs in restore_screen is right when it calls int 0x10
once again.

Not really anything we (as in bootcode hackers) can do for you, at this
point at least, because if int 0x10's aren't working, there's something
seriously broken/misconfigured. Never say never, though, it could just
be
a little typo hiding somewhere :)

Chris Noe
(stiker en northlink.com) 

-
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo en vger.rutgers.edu
Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/