[Xen-devel] RE: "Old method" bootloader failing with large ramdisk

[Dan Magenheimer <dan.magenheimer@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Don't know if anybody cares about this, but it
definitely appears to be a Xen bug.  By adding
unused junk to a working initrd, I can cause a
boot failure.  When the initrd.gz is 109MB
it boots fine, but boot fails at 126MB.  This
is with a 1GB guest, so I don't think it is
memory-size related.  Unfortunately, I didn't
measure the unpacked sizes of these.

I'm off to work on other things now as I have
a workaround (smaller initrd).

Dan

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Dan Magenheimer 
> Sent: Friday, April 24, 2009 5:22 PM
> To: Dan Magenheimer; Xen-Devel (E-mail)
> Subject: RE: "Old method" bootloader failing with large ramdisk
> 
> 
> I guess I should add that this is with a linux-2.6.29
> PV kernel so might be something there too.
> 
> And "not completely or properly" means that "/init"
> can't be found (sys_access("/init") fails for the
> large initrd
> 
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: Dan Magenheimer 
> > Sent: Friday, April 24, 2009 5:10 PM
> > To: Xen-Devel (E-mail)
> > Subject: "Old method" bootloader failing with large ramdisk
> > 
> > 
> > I'm trying to boot a PV guest using the "old method"
> > of passing kernel= and ramdisk= and it appears to
> > work fine with a "small" initrd but not with a "large"
> > one. (Small is 4MB, large is 154MB.)  I'm sure both
> > of the initrd's are properly gzip'ed etc.  Unpacked,
> > the large one approaches 400M.
> > 
> > By doing some kernel startup debugging, it appears
> > that the large initrd never finds its way into memory.
> > Or at least not completely or properly.
> > 
> > So I'm guessing that the "old method bootloader"
> > is having problems with the large initrd.  Silently,
> > I think, as I can't find anything that looks like errors
> > in /var/log/xen/domain-builder-ng.log.
> > 
> > Should this be expected to work?  Has anyone else
> > been successful with a large initrd doing this?
> > 
> > Thanks,
> > Dan
> > 
> > 
> >
>

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