Bug 681732

I thought with the release of main line 2.6.38 kernel, the issues related to syslinux, xz compression and kernel itself might fix the boot.iso. But that's still not the case. Please check

(In reply to comment #0)
> Steps to Reproduce:
> 1. Download
> http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/development/15/i386/os/images/boot.iso

0) That doesn't exist anymore (since F15 is out of development long ago). Now to be found at http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/releases/15/Fedora/i386/os/images/boot.iso.

> 2. Run "qemu -cdrom boot.iso -hda file.img"

1) That must have been something like: "qemu -cdrom boot.iso -hda file.img -boot d", otherwise you booted from the qemu virtual hard disk.

> 3. After the initrd is being uncompressed, the kernel panic is seen

2) You didn't include the kernel panic, but the fact that a kernel panic was seen actually suggests syslinux did its job. If you had added "-serio stdio" to the qemu command line, and "console=tty0 console=ttyS0" at the syslinux prompt (in the qemu session) you could have captured the kernel panic easily.

3) The only way I was able to trigger a kernel panic was by launching qemu with very little memory (eg, 128 MB). That gave this on stdio:
[...]
[    0.000000] initrd too large to handle, disabling initrd
[...]
[    2.595833] Kernel panic - not syncing: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on unknown-block(9,2)
[    2.601406] Pid: 1, comm: swapper Not tainted 2.6.38.6-26.rc1.fc15.i686 #1
[    2.605590] Call Trace:
[    2.608922]  [<c07ceb2d>] ? printk+0x2d/0x2f
[    2.612093]  [<c07cea06>] panic+0x5c/0x156
[    2.615704]  [<c0a59d60>] mount_block_root+0x218/0x238
[    2.620884]  [<c04eedcf>] ? sys_mknod+0x2c/0x2e
[    2.624049]  [<c0a59ef8>] mount_root+0x59/0x5f
[    2.626739]  [<c0a5a04c>] prepare_namespace+0x14e/0x192
[    2.630146]  [<c04e3968>] ? sys_access+0x25/0x27
[    2.633339]  [<c0a59a8f>] kernel_init+0x273/0x278
[    2.636558]  [<c0a5981c>] ? kernel_init+0x0/0x278
[    2.639272]  [<c040377e>] kernel_thread_helper+0x6/0x10

4) But whatever the importance of that kernel panic, I see nothing that indicates that syslinux (as included in that boot.iso) doesn't do what it's supposed to do: load a kernel and an initrd. So wrong component?

(In reply to comment #2)
> If you had added "-serio stdio" to the qemu command line [...].

s/-serio/-serial/

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