Kernel panic - not syncing: Attempted to kill idle task!

[SaberCat]

I installed Knoppix Version 5.1.1 from a donloaded CD image to a 2Gb Compact Flash card using the
instructions in O'Reilly book:

KNOPPIX HACKS 2nd Edition, Page: 367

(Knoppix boots OK from the CD on my Dell machine)

I then installed the card in a PC/104 single board computer from Tri-M, Inc. Its called a VSX104 and has the Vortex86SX "System on Chip (SoC)" chip on it (it has an AMI BIOS on it). It starts booting OK but then gets hung. Here is some of the output:

Uncompressing Linux...OK, booting the kernel
invalid opcode: 0000 [#1]
PREEMPT SMP
modules linked in:
.
.
.
Call Trace:
[<hex number1>] dpul+0x1a/0x134
[< " 2>] cpuset_add_file+0x4a/0x5c
[< " 3>] start_kernel+0x38d/0x400
[< " 4>] unknown_bootpotion+0x0/0x25c
=====================
Code: < lots of hex byte codes.....

...>
.
.
.
EIP:[< " 5>] identify_cpu+0x86/0x3ec SS:ESP 0066:c04a1fa0
<0> Kernel panic - not syncing: attempted to kill the idle task!
[hangs here]

Any ideas on what is happening?...

Thanks for any suggestions...

[hal8000]

If your single board computer has a cdrom or access to a usb cdrom try booting the knoppix cd that way.
You need to make sure that knoppix recognises and works with all hardware on your single board computer
before trying it on flash card.


The other test of course is to make sure that your single board computer can boot ok from flash card.
One way to do this is start with a minimal distro like puupy linux.
Hope that helps

[SaberCat]

Thanks for the reply...Here's what I've learned so far...

The single board computer (SBC) I am using (Tri-M, Inc. VSX104) has a Vortex86SX System-on-Chip (SoC) on it that contains an AMIBIOS. Through many re-tries I discovered that I needed to do a USB-ZIP installation of Damn Small Linux (DSL) to satisfy the (old?) BIOS. The current DSL (version 4.4.3 has dropped USB-ZIP support, so I used the CD that comes with the "The Official Damn Small Liniux" book (version 3.3.?). When I tried to install DSL from that to my Compact Flash card from my Dell Dimension machine, DSL complained that it couldn't read the partition table on sda. So I tried from my Dell Inspiron laptop and that worked. I was able to install DSL on the Compact Flash card.

I installed the card in my Tri-M, Inc. SBC and it booted -- to a point! But it got to a point where Linux was looking for a math co-processor, couldn't find one and hung! Humm...I should have anticipated that!...

So that's where I am at at the moment. Looks like I need to find a version of Linux that doesn't need a math coprocessor -- or a PC/104 co-processor card to add to my SBC. Maybe the puupy Linux distribution you suggested will to the trick. I only need a very minimal version that will run a program that can access /dev/ttyS0.

Thanks for your reply...I will keep working the problem. Any suggestions will be much appreciated!