There are quite a few postings on the web with similar problems. I've tried fsck on the current disk partitions, a newer sysvinit rpm, etc. but still the system I have hangs after "Freeing unused kernel memory ...".

I have a 2.6.19 kernel on a standard x86 machine instead of the 2.6.10 kernel I had before.

I have some printfs in init.c (in sysvinit-2.78) but it never prints those.

Any suggestions on how to debug this further?

Thanks much in advance.

Sounds like you are able to build your own kernel ?

In the Linux source code, linux/init/main.c there is a function called init.

You could try adding some printk messages into init. Don't use printf as that is for user-space programs. printk should print to the console, note that it does have logging levels so watch out, KERN_ERR is the highest log level. However, all printks will appear in dmesg.

Remember that a hang may prevent the last few printk messages from being seen. You could try adding delays by using ssleep() to allow time for the printks to be output.

The "Freeing unused kernel memory" message is output by free_initmem() called from the init function. Perhaps the hang happens at the point of "unlocking the kernel" ? or maybe the init function can not spawn the init program off the root file system ?

Thanks.

The problem was that the init (the parent of all) we had was modified from the default sysvinit and had something broken.

_Sri