>>>>> "James" == James Cowgill <[email protected]> writes:
> Hi, > On Sun, 2016-01-17 at 06:39 +0100, David Kuehling wrote: >> long time ago I was told that I need a newer PMON to boot recent >> linux kernels [5], but then read on debian-mips about problems after >> PMON upgrades [1]. [..] > So the old PMON in those machines (only itx-a1101) has a bug where it > loads the kernel at an address to close to the address the bootloader > is stored at. If the kernel being loaded has a large bss section (or > is large in memory for any reason), PMON will overwrite itself and > crash. > The bug appeared after this kernel commit: > https://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/commit/?id=c46173183657bbdbe0d54a981c28807581648422which > increased the size of the bss section to something like 20M on all > Loongson 3 kernels. > Back then I tried using PMON 4.something but it wouldn't boot any > kernel I threw at it. > In the end I patched the kernel to reduce the value of > MAX_PHYSMEM_BITS from 48 to 35 and it worked again - I think this > should be ok on all Loongson 3A machines. > Hopefully if you try that, any recent kernel will work with the old > PMON. Ok, just to make sure I understood correctly: you never managed to make the newer pmon 4 work with any kernels at all? That would be somewhat surprising, given that people were repeatedly told to upgrade PMON on these Loongson3 boxes. cheers, David -- GnuPG public key: http://dvdkhlng.users.sourceforge.net/dk2.gpg Fingerprint: B63B 6AF2 4EEB F033 46F7 7F1D 935E 6F08 E457 205F
