sti() freezes the kernel

I'm actually trying to start a 2.4 kernel on our new card. The kernel freezes when enabling interrupts with sti() in start_kernel() (just before calculating BogoMips...).
This looks like an interrupts is up when enabling so that it stops the MIPS and freezes the kernel.
I'm looking after this interrupt but I would like to know if there could be any others reasons for my kernel to freeze when doing a call to sti();

Quoted 6 lines · Yoann Allain

I'm actually trying to start a 2.4 kernel on our new card.
The kernel freezes when enabling interrupts with sti() in start_kernel() (just before calculating BogoMips...).
This looks like an interrupts is up when enabling so that it stops the MIPS and freezes the kernel.
I'm looking after this interrupt but I would like to know if there could be any others reasons for my kernel to freeze when doing a call to sti();

This is a fairly scenario and as you suspect it's being caused by interrupt problems, such as interrupts still pending from the firmware, being not initialized at all or similar.

Ralf

Since last mail I played with the interrupt masks (IM - bits 15-8 in MIPS status register) . From the MIPS cause register, it seems that the bit 15 (hardware interrupt 5 or timer interrupt) is the originator of the freezing interrupt. And the exception code shown for this interrupt is 6 corresponding to a Bus error exception. I think there's a pointer to the interrupt handler not correctly initialized. So that the interrupt makes a jump to nowhere.