Re: bootstra.tos broken on 68040/68060 real hardware
Hi Miro,
On Thu, 2026-07-16 at 23:32 +1000, Miro Kropáček wrote:
> I have been playing with Debian/m68k for a few days on my Atari Falcon with CT60. Maybe you are aware of the fact that CT60 TOS (basically a patched TOS 4.04) also contains its own version of ataboot (based on ataboot 3.3 from 2004).
>
> This built-in ataboot was able to boot 2.2.25 from Debian Sarge 3.1 just fine, with -T 0x8000000 even without -s (2.4.x, as you perhaps remember, is unable to boot without -s due to internal changes fixed much later).
>
> However that ataboot doesn't contain the important update from late 2004 which allowed to use the staging area also outside ST RAM, drastically limiting how big the kernel+initrd can be. For 2.2.25 it was fine, for Debian 10 or 12 it was way too little.
>
> So I switched to bootstra.tos/prg, unchanged since 2011 but in reality the same code base as m68kboot from linux-m68k. To my surprise, not only I couldn't get any new kernel booting (Debian 10, 12, some snapshot from 2023) but the 2.2.25 using the same bootargs wouldn't boot.
>
> After some digging I have found the culprit: for all those years, the data cache hasn't been flushed! A simple fix: https://github.com/mikrosk/m68kboot/commit/c6408a2e37fe9d43ad964f09fefcbed9aad361bc made ataboot.ttp working again.
>
> I guess one of the reasons why this bug went unnoticed is that Debian/m68k now lives mostly in Aranym which doesn't implement copy-back caching of the 68040.
>
> Now to figure out how to make the installer read the ISO ... Debian 3.1's one just scanned Atari TOS C:, D:, ... drives, Debian 10's (and later) for some reason refuses to do the same.
You can sent a patch to Geert and he will take care of it.
He is still a very active m68k maintainer.
Adrian
--
.''`. John Paul Adrian Glaubitz
: :' : Debian Developer
`. `' Physicist
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