Over the last couple of weeks I have been trying to get Linux/MIPS
installed on a Magnum 4000, and over the last couple of days have had
some success.  There's one thing, though, which is really slowing me down.
It seems that I can only boot the kernel from a floppy disk (which takes
forever because reads and writes are so slow on this hardware).  I have placed
a 10 MB MS-DOS partition at the beginning of the first hard drive and put
milo, pandora, and a vmlinux on it.  I can run milo or pandora fine from
that DOS partition, but the linux kernel always hangs after printing a
few lines (the last line is the "Console: Colour G364 128x48" one)...most of
the screen is white on red, while the kernel messages are white on black.
This also happens sometimes with the floppy boot, but not consistently.

Has anyone else seen this problem?  Is there anything I can try?  I'd
appreciate any help anyone can offer.

There are also a couple of other issues I was wondering about.  One of them
is the "sonic" ethernet driver.  The version number in the kernel I'm
using (2.1.90) is v0.50, but in linux-2.2.0 the driver says it's version 0.10.  
I thought all of the Magnum changes had been put in the Linux kernel sometime
after 2.1.100...did this slip through, get renumbered, or something else?

Also, I am having trouble building the linux-magnum-980323.tar.gz kernel
source from ftp.linux.sgi.com.  On an Intel Linux system, using the
cross-development tools binutils-2.7-3.tar.gz and gcc-2.7.2-3.tar.gz (from
sunsite.unc.edu/pub/Linux/ALPHA/mips, I get the following assembly language
errors:

int-handler.S: Assembler messages:
int-handler.S:66: Error: .previous without corresponding .section; ignored
int-handler.S:72: Error: .previous without corresponding .section; ignored
int-handler.S:75: Error: .previous without corresponding .section; ignored
int-handler.S:150: Error: .previous without corresponding .section; ignored
int-handler.S:222: Error: .previous without corresponding .section; ignored
int-handler.S:240: Error: .previous without corresponding .section; ignored
int-handler.S:241: Error: .previous without corresponding .section; ignored
int-handler.S:264: Error: .previous without corresponding .section; ignored

Do I need a newer binutils?  Some change to the configuration?

Thanks for any help anyone can give me on the above.

Reply via email to