New F11 for the XO-1 Build 6

[Yioryos Asprobounitis]

--- On Wed, 8/26/09, Daniel Drake <dsd at laptop.org> wrote:

> From: Daniel Drake <dsd at laptop.org>
> Subject: Re: New F11 for the XO-1 Build 6
> To: "Yioryos Asprobounitis" <mavrothal at yahoo.com>
> Cc: dirakx at gmail.org, "OLPC Testing" <testing at lists.laptop.org>, "OLPC Development" <devel at lists.laptop.org>, "sugar-devel" <sugar-devel at lists.sugarlabs.org>, "Fedora OLPC List" <fedora-olpc-list at redhat.com>, "Mitch Bradley" <wmb at laptop.org>
> Date: Wednesday, August 26, 2009, 11:16 PM
> 2009/8/27 Yioryos Asprobounitis
> <mavrothal at yahoo.com>:
> > I had this issue with os5 (see "...-swap" posts above
> in the  fedora-olpc-list). It is something not related to
> swap but is happening often enough. Usually after 1-3
> attempts removing all peripherals (and overclocking :)
> recovers and boots fine. Didn't have it with os6 yet.
> > Of course the old firmware does not help either :)
> 
> If it's freezing after the "loading ramdisk" line, then
> it's not
> related to swap. That's way too early for swap to be having
> an effect.
> 
> http://dev.laptop.org/ticket/9100
> 
> I also see this bug very often and work around it simply by
> turning
> off the machine for 5 minutes and trying again. Here are my
> findings
> so far:
> 
>  - nothing is output from the kernel on the serial console,
> so it is a
> very early freeze from the kernel standpoint
>  - the serial console does show a newline character *after*
> the
> "loading ramdisk" line, which seems to indicate that the
> ramdisk does
> load correctly and the crash is triggered by something that
> happens
> after
>  - the OFW frame key does not cause the debugger to start
>  - waiting a few minutes does seem to increase success rate
> - I have
> had very little success with on,off,on,off,on,off type
> cycles, but if
> you insert a few minutes wait inbetween then it does feel
> to be more
> likely to boot
>  - once booted, you can reboot indefinitely and it won't
> hang
>  - I discount reports that this is related to external
> devices, swap
> partitions, etc. I run my XOs with the standard
> configuration and no
> external devices and I frequently see this bug
>  - I've seen this ever since we upgraded kernel after 8.2
>  - the 8.2 kernels continue to work fine
> 
> Daniel

I subscribe 100% to your description. Actually when I say "1-3 attempts" I imply the old crash practice: Power off-"count 30 elephants"-power on :)
I guess the olpc-aware kernels may not be fully aware of olpc... 
How do you debug these *sooo* early things???...
>