https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=340436
User roland.kletzing@materna.de added comment
https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=340436#c8
--- Comment #8 from roland kletzing 2007-12-13 14:53:03 MST ---
i have talked to matt domsch and also to hpa (hans peter anvin) - conversation
was short and they don`t seem to be open for this at the moment (maybe too
busy).
at least they said it`s quite ok to have some additional information being
printed when probing the bios for disk information. will ask them again if they
can give more feedback on my patch.
meanwhile, i have talked to several long time admins and all could of them have
seen an issue like this once in their admin job, but couldn`t tell, what was
causing this.
furthermore, i have tested booting a recent suse installation disk on 10 older
systems and 2 of those (different models) showed that blinking cursor problem,
i.e. that hang i described.
since SUSE has CONFIG_EDD=m , all suse installations probe the bios on early
boot - and may got stuck at this stage - without any notice for the user.
CONFIG_EDD defaults to OFF in vanilla defconfig, but allmodconfig enables that
proble on early boot, btw!
i have attached a patch which could be helpful for everybody who runs into this
trap - and helps circumventing it.
before posting this for RFC to lkml, it would be nice if some suse kernel
developer could take a look or give a comment - or maybe supporting me with
posting this to lkml and getting this accepted in mainline.
i think it`s quite good to have this additional message, which _only_ get`s
printed, if boot got stuck inside the bios call. otherwise (because of \r in
printf) you just see an "OK" being printed, i.e. the whole line being
overwritten with "OK{lots_of_whitespaces}".
not an perfect approach, but it works - i have tested this on one of the
problematic systems.
i`d be happy about some feedback
regards
roland
--- linux-2.6.23/arch/x86/boot/main.c.orig 2007-12-09 11:40:24.315346712
+0100
+++ linux-2.6.23/arch/x86/boot/main.c 2007-12-09 16:11:43.644512504 +0100
@@ -152,7 +152,10 @@
/* Query EDD information */
#if defined(CONFIG_EDD) || defined(CONFIG_EDD_MODULE)
- query_edd();
+ printf("Querying Bios for boot-device information (EDD)\n");
+ printf("If boot hangs here, you may have a buggy Bios. Try edd=skipmbr
or edd=off");
+ query_edd();
+ printf("\rOK
\n");
#endif
/* Do the last things and invoke protected mode */
go_to_protected_mode();
--
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