On Monday 25 August 2008 14:27:16 Doug Chapman wrote:

Sometime leading up to the F9 kernel my very large ia64 system (64 cpu 1TB ram, bunch of PCI busses and I/O) fails to boot. It appears to be something in how nash/mkinitrd gets information from sysfs. Since this is an early boot-time issue and nash isn't very easy to debug I am having trouble getting to the root of the issue (but I am still investigating).

I have however found what change triggered this. The default config file used to have CONFIG_SYSFS_DEPRECATED=y set. Upstream kernel commit d47846c5866b7d98a1173c86a39d810a06647329 renamed this to CONFIG_SYSFS_DEPRECATED_V2. It appears the default is still "y" however somehow with the transition the Fedora kernel now has this off.

If possible I would like to see this get set to "y" for now. I will continue to debug this as it certainly _should_ boot just fine without this set. Even if we just turn it on for ia64 that works for me (but I imagine some new big x86_64 systems may run into it once they grow this large).

Just committed the change to flip those on for ia64-only.