Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!gatech!udel!mmdf
From: obrien@torolab2.iinus1.ibm.com (Kevin O'Brien)
Newsgroups: comp.os.minix
Subject: Minix-386 HELP!!
Message-ID: <37483@nigel.ee.udel.edu>
Date: 28 Nov 90 16:00:36 GMT
Sender: mmdf@ee.udel.edu
Lines: 32

Peter Holzer says,
>load the kernel, mm, fs and init. After this it said "Starting
>Minix", cleared the screen, told me how much memory the computer
>has, Minix needs, etc. and then -- nothing.

I also had this problem. After spending some time with db, and putting
print statements in fs and mm, I discovered that init was using more
stack space than the 0x1c bytes that INIT_STK (I think thats the name)
was defined as. It got a segmentation error and was killed. This is why,
at least in my case, init doesn't appear when you hit F1. I made the
initial stack for init very large (by changing the constant mentioned
above, my first attempt, doing a chmem, had no effect - init is special!)
and after rebuilding init worked like a charm.

I should probably also mention the next problem I ran into. After init
started, my system still didn't come up. I discovered that after forking,
process 3 tried to read /etc/rc without success, although the file was
present on my shoelace diskette. After debuggin for several days, I found
that the root directory which was read in at fs init time had garbage
in it. The fix to this was to change the shoelace config file to say
that the root device was my hard disk partition. Now I get minix to
boot, run login and so on. I haven't run the test cases yet, but all the
commands I have tried work, so far. One thing which doesn't work is
emacs, it gets a memory fault and core dumps on startup.

Oh, I should mention that I was booting from a 1.44meg drive. I am
assuming that this early, something doesn't know how to handle this.

To John Nall, Sorry about the deafening silence John! I was planning to
let you know how things went when I had sorted all this stuff out.

                              Kevin O'Brien