to make a long story a little shorter, once upon a time, i had a 2.5.xx kernel running on my 8xx-based board. i used the latest bk checkout from bkbits.net and had at least a minimal operational kernel that would boot, mount its root filesystem, mount JFFS2 and a bit more.
finally getting back to that, i grabbed the latest stock (2.6.11-5) kernel and tried to reproduce that. by hand, i perused my old config file, duplicated what i could, made (relatively?) intelligent decisions about new options and tried again. to keep things simple, i left out absolutely *everything* that wasn't essential for just an initial boot -- no networking, no MTD, not even an initrd -- i just wanted to see the kernel boot and would be quite happy for it to get to trying to mount the root filesystem, only to choke and fall over. no problem. however, after (all based on ELDK 3.1 cross-compilation): $ make ARCH=ppc menuconfig $ make ARCH=ppc $ ppc_8xx-objcopy -O binary zImage.elf zImage.bin download (via planet core boot loader) to 400000 in RAM, and "g 400000", i get: loaded at: 00400000 00485160 board data at: 00483124 00483140 relocated to: 00405090 004050AC zimage at: 004058C8 0048275F avail ram: 00486000 02000000 Linux/PPC load: rw root=/dev/ram0 Uncompressing Linux...done. Now booting the kernel ... hangs ... of course, there are an infinite number of ways i could have screwed up, but one possibility is that i just messed up configuring the console port. the kernel could very well be loading but, as this is a bare board with no blinkenlights or anything, there's no way to tell. has anything changed in the last little while in terms of the console port? i tried to reproduce faithfully my earlier config options for console port support, but no luck. thoughts? the problem could, of course, be elsewhere but i'd like to check this out first. rday