From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.3) Gecko/20030314 Description of problem: On a kernel built with HIGHMEM support (4GB in my case), booting with the kernel option "vga=0x305" or any similar graphics mode causes the kernel to immediately hang with a blank screen at the beginning of the boot sequence. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): kernel-2.4.18-* and/or kernel-2.4.20-* How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. Build custom kernel with HIGHMEM support. 2. Add kernel boot option "vga=0x305". 3. Try to boot new kernel. Actual Results: See Description. Expected Results: Kernel should have booted. Additional Information: Although my system is an Athlon platform, I doubt that has anything to do with it. It's probably a generic i386 problem? Also, maybe this only happens if the system actually tries to use the high memory? I didn't try to boot the kernel on a system with less than 1 GB of RAM. Kernel 2.4.21-rc2 has a fix for this which is easily back-ported. In "drivers/video/vesafb.c", replace the line video_size = screen_info.lfb_size * 65536; with the following line: video_size = screen_info.lfb_width * screen_info.lfb_height * video_bpp;
Its not quite so simple a fix but its getting there as of rc7. Its triggered with very large amounts of video ram and a lot of main memory.
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