I'm having problems booting the 2.4.5 kernel on my alpha machine. I've used both the stock kernel source (from kernel.org) and the debian kernel source with the same results. I believe it comes down to the sym53c875 SCSI controller in the machine. When I boot the new kernel, it will freeze after initializing the SCSI card while trying to identify what SCSI disks are present. I've tried the sym53c8xx driver, the NCR 53c8xx driver, and the old NCR 53c7,8xx driver. Only the sym53c8xx driver gets to the point of attempting to ID the SCSI devices.
I should note that the generic 2.2.19-2 kernel in the 2.2r3 release works fine, and it uses the sym53c8xx driver. Also, (obviously), the version of the sym53c8xx driver is different in the 2.2.19 and 2.4.5 kernels. In configuring the kernel, I have SCSI support, SCSI disk support, and SCSI CDROM support. In addition, I compile the sym53c8xx driver into the kernel, and no other drivers. I found a note on another Alpha mailing list about someone having the same problem with the 2.4.test1 kernel, but no follow-up or solution was posted. Does anyone have suggestions? My setup: 21164A processor EB164, variation PC164 type system SMC FDC37C93X Ultra IO controller that contains: DEC Tulip ethernet controller sym53c875 SCSI controller 256MB RAM Debian woody/testing (except for X11 packages, which are from potato) -- | Martin Sanborn - Dept. of Chemical Engineering - Northwestern University | | m-sanborn@ nwu.edu - (847)467-1653 - http://zeolites.cqe.nwu.edu/marty |
