[LinuxBIOS] Kernel crash output (was: What's stored in the CMOS by LB?)

[Peter Stuge]

On Wed, Apr 26, 2006 at 09:02:12AM -0700, Eric Poulsen wrote:
> As usual, flipping to the factory BIOS, seeing the "corrupt CMOS"
> message, and re-writing the CMOS fixed the issue.

Are you sure this is actually the case, as opposed to "after
rebooting with the factory BIOS the system does not crash immediately
on the next boot with LinuxBIOS" - they are quite different.

> I immediately flipped back to LB, and it worked as expected.

Worked reliably or did not crash while you were looking?

Can you reliably reproduce the crash? If not there's no way to tell
if the problem has been fixed or merely isn't manifesting itself at
that particular point in time.

Does just rebooting with LinuxBIOS produce different results than
factory(resetCMOS)->LinuxBIOS?

I second Richard on running memtest86, RAM problems can cause all
sorts of funny things.


> I looked at the CMOS code in src/pc80/mc146818rtc.c.

Any system that requires special data to be in CMOS or anywhere else
and does not validate this data before using it is broken.

If one of the OS/mainboard combinations LinuxBIOS works with requires
data in CMOS I guess it could just as well be the OS' responsibility
to validate/create it, but such a dependency would be kind of stupid
IMHO..


//Peter