Hi Slackware forum,
I am a longtime Slackware user. This is my first post.
I generally use a manually configured kernel, but I keep the huge kernel on my EFI partition too. This worked fine until the Slackware64 15.0 upgrade.
I can boot the huge kernel successfully from the CD, as per the instructions. I created an initrd and the generic kernel boots fine with elilo. My custom kernel works with elilo too.
The huge kernel loads, then it says "done" for a blink of the eye and the screen goes black and the computer reboots. So, I see no error or panic messages.
I would attach a dmesg from a successful boot, but attachments are forbidden.
Any suggestions for pinpointing the problem?
Thanks, DW

You can add attachment to your post, either .log or .txt (and of course, images such as jpg,png etc)
If you get an message of file being too big. Make sure the file only contain the relevant information (i.e. make it smaller)

Have a look at elilo.conf file, and the line pointing to the kernel. ( image= realybigkernel ). The name here has to match the file name of the kernel. If it is not an exact match, it fails.

There is a script that copies the kernels and renames them. Installing a kernel in /boot dir, the names contain this vmlinuz-huge-5.15.27. The script renames the huge kernel to vmlinuz-huge. So, depending how the kernel got copied, you can have a mis-match in the names and failure to boot.

Make sure the version of elilo.efi you have in /boot/efi/EFI/Slackware is the one from slackware-15.0 and not the one from slackware-14.1. My recollection is that older versions of elilo.efi cannot boot images of the size of the huge kernel from 15.0.

Upgrading elilo to the latest version fixed the problem. I thought that was the first thing I tried. Shame on me.
Thanks for the advice.

To clarify, I hadn't properly upgraded elilo. I had not changed the elilo.efi bootloader in the EFI/slackware/ directory.

3 members found this post helpful.