[gentoo-releng] 2004.2 livecd issue

[Whitley CTR Cecil H]

Hi,

I was put in contact with John Davis about a week ago concerning an issue
i'm having with the 2004.2 livecd.  After some research, it appears to be a
re-emergence of a previously reported problem.  See bug id 42345.  Initially
I thought it was accessibility related (I use speakup), but the problem
occurs whether or not speakup is on.  

Details:

I have a p4 3.4 (northwood) Asus p4c800-e deluxe mobo with 1gb RAM (matched
pc-3200 in a dual channel memory configuration).  evga fx5900-vivo video
card, Seagate s-ata (internal), and an external USB drive bay with a Maxtor
40gb hd.  Sony dvd and sony cd-rw drives (hdc and hdd respectively).  Upon
boot with the smp kernel (2.6.7-gentoo-r11) I have an unconfigured eth0
(onboard Intel e1000 csa 82547).  When I run net-setup I get a kernel panic.
The "helpfull" error msg is "n interrupt not synching".  I lose keyboard
control, etc and only the reset button works.  

The 2.4.26-gentoo-r6? kernel works fine and properly configures the network
adapter.  I have loaded the system with 2.4.26-gentoo-r9 compiled for SMP
support and other than issues relating to booting from a USB external hd,
the system seems to be stable.  I am however having to insmod usb-storage
and rerun devfsd /dev -np in order for the hd to be recognized and root of
/dev/sda1 to be loaded.  At some point i'll mod the linuxrc to do this
automagically.  2.6.8-gentoo-r3 is not yet functional, but this may relate
to devfs/udev (i.e. user failure) and I simply haven't had time to gather
all relevant information and throughly test.  

At this point I haven't gotten the system fully configured, but I think i'm
far enough along to provide logs from the 2.6.7 boot, although logging the
panic is beyond my technical skills (I make a decent monkey though, so if
you tell me what to type where i'll give it a try).  In particular, if I can
redirect the log to my hd along with any crash dump i'm more than willing
to.

Regards,

Cecil Whitley