[OLPC-devel] suggested requirement for new kernels and initrds: must boot under qemu and/or kexec as kernel and initrd before release as a stream

[Marcelo Tosatti]

Hi Ronald,

On Tue, Jul 04, 2006 at 12:08:58PM -0600, Ronald G Minnich wrote:
> 
> I'd like to suggest that we require that new kernels and initrd's boot 
> correctly under qemu via the -kernel and -initrd switches. The reason is 
> that if they won't boot under qemu, they probably won't boot under kexec 
> either. I have yet to work out what the problem is, I've been scratching 
> my head until now trying to verify that it is a problem; but there is no 
> question in my mind that SOMETHING about the kernel/initrd on the devel 
> disk is not playing well with qemu AND kexec -- although grub seems to 
> work.

Agreed - also its not fun to reflash all the time when doing sw development.

> So, for all new releases, it ought to be possible to automate a quick 
> boot under qemu:
> qemu -nographic -kernel whatever -initrd whatever -append "command line" 
> -hda "the image" -boot c
> 
> Or, if you just want to watch it, skip the nographic step.
> 
> I have a kernel/initrd that I can boot under linuxbios (as a 
> mkelfimage); under qemu; and under kexec. I can actually boot this 
> kernel/initrd as flash ROM in linuxbios; then I can boot it from the 
> linux that boots from linuxbios; then I can boot it from itself; and it 
> boots fine under qemu. This is doable. In fact it has worked very 
> reliably until just the last month or two, when kernel/initrd pairs 
> started to become unreliable under qemu for reasons I am going to try to 
> understand. Something's broken!

Are you using serial console? Otherwise CONFIG_VGA_NOPROBE makes the
console not work. Can we disable that for now and use VGA console?

Other than that, I think CONFIG_MGEODE_LX=y might cause problems in qemu.

> I have had a lot of trouble with reliably booting the olpc devel 
> kernel/initrd's at all.
> 
> I hope this idea is ok. I think qemu booting is a very good early test 
> for kexec booting, and we really need solid kexec support.

Jordan, can you please change the CPU type to generic i386 in defconfig?

It shrinks bzImage by about 16k.