Jurij Smakov wrote: > > On Wed, 2 Nov 2005, Andrew Sharp wrote: > > >> it will boot into SMP, but eventually fails with a "wrong magic" error. > > > > eventually fails in what way? during boot? after running for two > > weeks? > > It's probably "cramfs: wrong magic", typical failure message when the > kernel cannot find the initrd (identified by some 4-byte magic number) in > the expected place. It might be that there is still some breakage in the > memory copying routines, which I've hit before.
OK sorry about skimping on the detail there but I was trying to summarise the situation in case it interested anybody in other timezones. Freeing initrd memory:2160k freed cramfs: wrong magic Press L1-A to return to the boot prom spin_lock (f0204000) CPU#1 stuck at f0062c94, owner PC(f002b068):CPU(0) [repeats] Hope that's right, I've got screen/keyboard attached to the machine rather than running over a tty. The system's run overnight except that KStars has bombed (nothing useful in the backtrace) and a telnet session is telling me: Message from [EMAIL PROTECTED] at Wed Nov 2 23:56:18 2005 ... localhost kernel: Kernel panic: Wheee. Kernel does fpu/atomic unaligned load/store. However the desktop and shell still appear to be running which is curious- when is a panic not a panic? What I'm planning to do is reboot the system from the same kernel over the LAN using 2x Sun modules and run it for a few days to check basic stability. I'm the first to admit that I have limited understanding of this architecture but my previous experience using Woody suggested adequate reliability, both on SPARCstations and SPARCservers- whatever some people think of my hack to get the latter running :-) > >> Reverting to Ross modules, if I build a standalone kernel I find it's too > >> large > >> to boot from disc, but I can boot it over the LAN (boot net > >> root=/dev/sda2) and > >> the system runs SMP reliably. However I notice that while the BogoMIPS > >> rating of > >> a single CPU is 150 when running SMP it's dropped to 104 per processor- I > >> thought this was calibrated using a tight loop? > > The old trick to reduce the size of the image on sparc32 to acceptable one > is to run the following command on the image after the build: > > strip -R .comment -R .note -K sun4u_init -K _end -K _start image > > This strips it of non-essential sections, decreasing its size quite > dramatically. Thanks, I think this is probably what I'm looking for and I'll investigate. Obviously non-essential code has already been modularised. Is that sun4u_init appropriate for sun4cdm? > >> I'm assuming that none of the core developers will be looking at this > >> because of > >> the age of the hardware, and I don't have the hardware information to even > >> start > >> making sense of this sort of problem. However as a workaround can anybody > >> point > >> me at the documentation that describes the Debian/SPARC-specific kernel > >> rebuild > >> procedure- running the standard "make vmlinux" gives me a kernel image of > >> around > >> 2Mb. > >> > >> My position is that I'm keen on promoting Sun kit for in-house use, but > >> having > >> to boot over the LAN makes it difficult to argue that they are a viable > >> alternative to PCs, and if I'm not confident making that argument I'm not > >> going > >> to put my neck on the block and ask for money for newer systems. > > I gave up on sparc32 after multiple attempts to make 2.6.11 and 2.6.12 > work reliably on my Hypersparc system failed. I've recently got myself a > new SS20 with hypersparc CPUs, so I'm currently trying to figure out how > 2.6.14 will behave on it. Hopefully, I'll have something definite to say > about by weekend, so stay tuned :-). I am pretty sure that SMP will not > work though. I think a line has to be drawn somewhere. I want to get Sarge working on this kit since I need to demonstrate FPC/Lazarus running on non-PCs and think it's prudent to start with a binary port of the compiler. In general I'd suggest that getting 2.4 working on 32-bit SPARCs is worthwhile, with any work in later releases limited to making sure that 2.4 can be used as a fallback from 2.6 or whatever. For some reason I can't successfully build 2.2 under Sarge, but that and getting one or more SPARCservers running are fairly low on my list of priorities. -- Mark Morgan Lloyd markMLl .AT. telemetry.co .DOT. uk [Opinions above are the author's, not those of his employers or colleagues] -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
