Hi Andrew,
Thanks for the email back.
Andrew Morton wrote:
Ever written the previous year on your checks? Well when I was googling
about for folks with similar woes, the posts I had thought were from
this January were actually from Jan 2007. O Well! Not to mention it's
been awhile since I've posted to lkml ....
In this case, not needed. I spent friday taking a tour of the codepath
and basically narrowed it down to a device driver passing bum data.
So if this ever happens in the future and someone somewhere seems the
message about trying to load binfmt-xxxx (where xxxx is 0000 or some
other "random" number * (hold that thought I'll come back to this) )
here are some things to consider as you're debugging your problem.
In my case, the device driver was just good enough that it could access
the device, but was poor enough that the bits it was loading were
complete crap ... So the kernel was happily running along booting,
gets to the point where it's time to exec init, loads the first bits of
the binary, does a compare to make sure it's an elf binary, fails the
compare (because the data is junk) ... the kernel figures that ooo ..
this data must be good it's just in a different format ... I'll run
through the list of known binary file formats.. hmm not that one .. or
that one .... then running out of options trys to load a module for
what must be this amazing new file format, can't find the module and
ker-blew-ee.
* So this number that is part of the module name binfmt-xxxx is from
what I see the id of the file format ... thankfully no one has choosen
0000 as their id ...
As this is a boot time issue it's certainly not a DOS. Now there might
be value is thinking about this error path in the initial boot up of the
kernel. The message is a bit obscure for what the real issue is. Still
.. should one go back to the device and comfirm that the data received
was actually reasonable? No.
So I think we have two cases here:
Bootup:
I could see a change where the system should probably panic with some
sort of message like : "Not able to exec %s, unrecognized file format"
if this were to happen at boot up. I could put together a patch.
Running System:
If this happens after the system is up and running, I'd think one is
going to have some data in dmeg probably to the tune of "media error"
... so in my mind, who cares about that case.
Regards,
Tom
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