From: Herbert Xu The recent patch produces a message with no terminating newline on the machine in question. This is because one of the four bytes that you're printing out is NUL. The following patch avoids that problem. arch/i386/kernel/mpparse.c | 9 +++------ 1 files changed, 3 insertions(+), 6 deletions(-) diff -puN arch/i386/kernel/mpparse.c~mpparse-printk-fix arch/i386/kernel/mpparse.c --- 25/arch/i386/kernel/mpparse.c~mpparse-printk-fix 2003-11-14 01:18:56.000000000 -0800 +++ 25-akpm/arch/i386/kernel/mpparse.c 2003-11-14 01:18:56.000000000 -0800 @@ -361,15 +361,12 @@ static int __init smp_read_mpc(struct mp unsigned char *mpt=((unsigned char *)mpc)+count; if (memcmp(mpc->mpc_signature,MPC_SIGNATURE,4)) { - printk("SMP mptable: bad signature [%c%c%c%c]!\n", - mpc->mpc_signature[0], - mpc->mpc_signature[1], - mpc->mpc_signature[2], - mpc->mpc_signature[3]); + printk(KERN_ERR "SMP mptable: bad signature [0x%x]!\n", + *(u32 *)mpc->mpc_signature); return 0; } if (mpf_checksum((unsigned char *)mpc,mpc->mpc_length)) { - printk("SMP mptable: checksum error!\n"); + printk(KERN_ERR "SMP mptable: checksum error!\n"); return 0; } if (mpc->mpc_spec!=0x01 && mpc->mpc_spec!=0x04) { _