Hi Christian,
It seems I never sent my answer, the server ran out of memory while I was typing this...
Leastways I never saw your answer before ...
The Amiga only has the keyboard to reset, no reset switch that could be wired up to some piece of electronics hanging off a port on your PC? (Not that I have a clear idea how to implement such a thing but I'm sure something like the parallel port can be rigged to generate a suitable pulse for example.) You'd still need serial console output captured on another machine to check whether the kernel has panicked though.If Christian can bring his Amiga back online I'm sure we can either bisect his ariadneII problem or at least check whether it behaves better in the genirq branch. From memory, it was possible to remotely install kernels on the Amiga and reboot it successfully remotely, Christian?Yes, with the right mix of startup-sequences and kernels it was possible to autoboot and even change the kernel remotely. Only when the kernel hangs you have to reboot the machine via keyboard, it would pick the next kernel in
What would you use to reset the watchdog? Disk I/O, some device interrupts being serviced normally (a software watchdog timer does rely on timer interrupts still working normally so anything locking up the machine hard would require a hardware watchdog)?the list then. I will have to set that up again on crest (aahz is not yet upgraded to the TLS kernel). However, this only works as long as nothing goes wrong. One kernel crash, and you need to reboot manually (or could we enable the watchdog in the kernel to automatically reboot?).
We might be able to trigger a reboot whenever the kernel throws a panic() perhaps, that might cover most of the common cases. If the system comes up without working ethernet, something like
ping -q -c 30 -w 60 gateway || rebootrun from a cron job after the network has been brought up might be used to catch this. Booting back to a known good kernel after this should be good enough to get the next test kernel installed and booted.
Is there a working serial driver for whatever serial interface crest has? Using a nullmodem cable and cu or kermit, it might be possible to remotely access the machine for kernel installs or load and unload ethernet driver modules even in the absence of working ethernet for this sort of tests.
Just a few thoughts - I still think we should try the latest 3.0-genirq on crest first. Apropos - what's the state with kullervo? Do we have working ethernet there but no disk?
Cheers, Michael