MILO and Kernel hocus-pocus (more or less a summary)

["Philippe Girolami" <girolami eclia5 ec-lille fr>]

Hello,

For those of you who have been following my posts (actually, how could you
not...), I've been setting-up linux/red-hat 5 on an avanti.
I've used a 2.0.33 kernel with kernel.org patches and I commented out the
line in traps.c which prints out "unaligned kernel ** "errors.

I have access to a WinNT ARC so I will be using MILO to boot with linload
although, up to today, I have been "practicing" with milo by loading its
image through tftp.

The problem with all this was that when I did:
"shutdown -r now", everything was shutdown and the alpha went to MILO's
screen with the countdown.
When the countdown got to 0, the message about initializing the ramdisk was
displayed then the registers were dumped.

All this time I was issuing a
boot sda7:vmlinux1.gz root=/dev/sda7
at the MILO prompt

Testing various things to get this working, I tried building the
aforementionned kernel again (without commenting out the error message)
and I booted that one:
boot sda7:vmlinux.gz root=/dev/sda7

Everything went as expected and, just out of curiosity I did a 
"shutdown -r now"
and, this time, it rebooted !!!
I tried a second time and it worked again, then I renamed my kernel to
vmlinux.gz and rebooted again and tried to reboot with that one and that
worked too.

So now I get really curious and power on/off the machine and reboot my
previous kernel (which is now called vmlinux.gz), just to see if changing
the name had done the trick.  It booted ok but failed to reboot, just as it
used to when it was called vmlinux1.gz.

So it seems like my new kernel is the only one which will reboot with milo,
so I get rid of the printf statement about kernel unaligned errors in
traps.c and I build it again.

After testing different login situations, I have come to the conclusion
that MILO will reboot this kernel in all situations... but don't ask me
why.
So now, I have, essentially, the same kernel as before except that MILO
does reboot it !!

I just thought you might be interested in this magic :)

Just out of curiosity, where do the ftp.kernel.org files come from? Are
they an "official" mirror of gatekeeper or redhat for kernels and patches?

Philippe Girolami
PS: thanks to jay for the lengthy response to my previous message !