When booting linux kernel in Gentoo....

[Hyperblaze]

I'm in the process of trying to boot my kernel in gentoo. I keep this problem though.

No local APIC present or hardware disabled

I have this in my grub.conf config

root=/dev/ram0 real_root=/dev/hdc3 init=/linuxrc
ramdisk_size=8192 (on a separate line)

I have / on /dev/hdc3 and /boot as /dev/hdc1 (hdc2 is my swap partition)

I've tried to adding acpi=ht and acpi=off on two different trial runs
after the init=/linuxrc part

After googling a bit, I found that if you boot with "lapic" it would force-enable the local APIC. (No idea how to boot with "lapic" though, they did not provide an example)

 

[Nothinman]

ACPI and APIC are two seperate things. The message you mention isn't a problem as far as I can tell, what's the real problem or the symptoms?

And why do you have root=/dev/ram0, real_root=/dev/hdc3 and init=/linuxrc on your kernel command-line?

 

[Hyperblaze]

Originally posted by: Nothinman
ACPI and APIC are two seperate things. The message you mention isn't a problem as far as I can tell, what's the real problem or the symptoms?

And why do you have root=/dev/ram0, real_root=/dev/hdc3 and init=/linuxrc on your kernel command-line?

I was unaware they were two different things. When I googled the last line "No local APIC present or hardware disabled" I received a few pages where they were talking in reference to ACPI

As for the problem....

the "No local....." line is the last line which is shown before my box crashes.

 

[Nothinman]

Well you could alway just try booting with the lapic parameter, but I would first figure out why you have the other parameters in there first because AFAIK that's an extremely f'd up kernel parameter line you have there.

 

[Hyperblaze]

Originally posted by: Nothinman
Well you could alway just try booting with the lapic parameter, but I would first figure out why you have the other parameters in there first because AFAIK that's an extremely f'd up kernel parameter line you have there.

Woops, I forgot to include that part.

The root=/dev/ram0, real_root=/dev/hdc3 init=/linxrc was mentioned to me after I compiled the kernel
using genkernel.

It told me to include that in the kernel line

edit: can you give an example how to try booting with the lapic parameter?

 

[Nothinman]

Just put lapic with the rest of those kernel parameters.

And if Gentoo actually tells you to use those kernel parameters, it's even more f'd up then I thought.

 

[silverpig]

Originally posted by: Nothinman
Just put lapic with the rest of those kernel parameters.

And if Gentoo actually tells you to use those kernel parameters, it's even more f'd up then I thought.

It's a genkernel thing. I never use it.

OP: re-compile your kernel without genkernel. Follow the install guide for the non-genkernel kernel installation and use a normal grub.conf

 

[MikeMike]

yea, manually configure it instead of using the genkernel.

#Which listing to boot as default. o is the first, 1 is the second etc.
default 0
#How many seconds to wait before the default listing is booted.
timeout 30
#Nice, fat splash-image to spice things up
#Comment out if you dont have a graphics card installed.
#splashimage=(hd1,0)/grub/splash.xpm.gz

title=Gentoo Linux 2.6.9
#partition where the kernel image (or operating system) is located.
root (hd0,0)
kernel /kernel-2.6.9-gentoo root=/dev/hdb3 video=vesafb
savedefault
boot
#The next four lines are only if you dualboot with a Windows system.
#title=Windows XP
#rootnoverify (hd0,0)
#makeactive
#chainloader +1

that happens to be my kernel right now. the splash image was messin with my video so i commented it out.

MIKE

 

[drag]

Apic was made to be used on SMP systems, but it is used lots of times on uniproccessor systems, too.


APIC stands for "Advanced Programmable Interrupt Controller". What it does is that it allows flexible assignment of interrupts between multiple cpus. Basicly which CPU handles which IRQ. On a uniproccessor systems it is used to provide a more efficient way of handling hardware, you don't need support from it, but for instance I have a VIA motherboard whose onboard nic has a hardware bug that cause it will lock up if I don't have APIC enabled.

ACPI is for Advanced Configuration and Power Management. Back in the day you had APM, which is advanced power managment, however that was BIOS-based. ACPI is similar but it allows the OS to handled the behavoir to a large extent, plus it allows for other stuff to go on hardware to OS-wise then just power managment.

APM and ACPI are generally incompatable (don't worry about ACPI and APIC coexisting, though). In Linux you have a couple daemons (background services) that handle this sort of thing, apmd and acpid. You only want one of those running. Generally you want to use ACPI since it's superior in most respects to APM, however if you have a machine that Linux has incomplete ACPI support for then you may want to use APM to get some of the special features.

just a FYI.

I was confused to hell first time I tried playing around with APIC/ACPI. Both look the same, and are kinda dealing with similar stuff.


Also in your BIOS make sure that you have non-PNP OS selected. (you only want to that enabled for Win9x OSes. Not even WinXP should have that enabled)

 

[Carl Uman]

I can't say much about genkernel as I haven't used it. The manual confing (make menuconfig) just seemed much better way to go.