Denis,

Thanks for your help. But I am somewhat amiss. Are you saying that the 
error is actually in /sbin/init? This does not make sense to me since I 
can still boot using, I assume, /sbin/init for 2.4.21-0.13mdk. Some 
other facts since my last email:

It is definitely an incompatibility between the hardware and the kernel. 
I created a .config for my desktop, compiled and rebooted just fine 
(some module errors but that's not my big worry now). When I used this 
same .config for my ezra laptop, I get the same exact hang...right 
before init. I have also tried setting the architecture to a more 
"compatible" i586. I know this should work since it is the configuration 
Mandrake used for 9.1, which works fine on the laptop. Same error. It 
seems nothing I do will let init work.

Any more assistance you could provide would be greatly appreciated.

-Brandon

Denis Vlasenko wrote:

>>It's been a while since I tried to compile a kernel, but I did a good 
>>effort searching for already existing answers to my situation, so I feel 
>>I'm in a somewhat unique situation.
>>
>>As the title says, booting up the kernel hangs after
>>Mounted devfs on /dev
>>Freeing unused kernel memory: 144k freed
>>
>>Magic sysreq gives me (painfully transcribed):
>>
>>SysRq : Show Regs
>>
>>Pid: 1, comm:                 init
>>EIP: 0060:[<c012634a>] CPU:0
>>EIP is at force_sig_info+0x4a/0x100
>> EFLAGS: 00000282    Not tainted
>>EAX: 00000000 EBX: c14cd840 ECX: 00000002 EDX: 00000000
>>ESI: 00000004 EDI: c010c6e0 EBP: c14cff18 DS: 007b ES: 007b
>>CR0: 8005003b CR2: 4006e950 CR3: 1dd8d000 CR4: 00000080
>>Call Trace:
>> [<c010c6e0>] do_invalid_op+0x0/0xb0
>> [<c010c747>] do_invalid_op+0x67/0xb0
>> [<c012517e>] do_timer+0xfe/0x110
>> [<c012517e>] do_timer+0xfe/0x110
>> [<c0111236>] timer_interrupt+0xe6/0xf0
>> [<c0121563>] do_softirq+0xb3/0xc0
>> [<c010c6e0>] do_invalid_op+0x0/0xb0
>> [<c010bdcd>] error_code+0x2d/0x40
>>
>>CTRL-ALT-DEL works, so the system isn't totally hung. But no other 
>>evidence of activity.
>>    
>>
>
>Probably a SIGILL shower is raining on you. Your /sbin/init
>is causing it. I had one when I tried to run 686 one on
>a 486 box ;)
>--
>vda
>