On Wed, 24 Feb 2016, Bob Tracy wrote:
On Wed, Feb 24, 2016 at 08:27:42PM +1300, Michael Cree wrote:On Tue, Feb 23, 2016 at 12:23:44PM -0500, Alex Winbow wrote:On Sat, 20 Feb 2016, Helge Deller wrote:On 20.02.2016 08:41, Michael Cree wrote:On Sat, Feb 20, 2016 at 12:09:49AM -0500, Alex Winbow wrote:I'm unable to boot kernel 4.2 or 4.4 on SX164. aboot loads the kernel and the initrd successfully, then returns to the SRM prompt -- no error messages. (I'm using kernel 3.16 at present.) Are there any known issues with Linux 4.x over 3.x on alpha, or on SX164/EB164 in particular?Yes, I have seen the same thing with the Debian 4.3 generic kernel. But a self-built 4.3 kernel boots fine.I'm glad to hear that self-built kernels do boot for both of y'all, so there must be something in the kernel config that relates to the very early kernel startup that is different for the generic Debian config vs. your own configs. Any ideas what that might be? I guess I'll start by setting machinetype from generic to SX164 and rebuilding.Yes, that is worth trying. I had built kernels for dp264 and titan and they are working.
Success with kernel 4.4.2, built entirely using the Debian package configuration options with only two changes: machinetype set from generic to SX164, and CONFIG_ALPHA_SRM=y.
Obviously I'm thinking that CONFIG_ALPHA_SRM may be highly significant here! But this is just /too/ obvious, to the point of rediculousness. Did older Debian kernels have this option =y? Is not having this option known to cause SRM to fail? Did this option become required at some point?
The other question is, can we set this option in the default Debian config for the auto-built packages? I would imagine that most (all?) users of Debian-alpha are running SRM and not AlphaBIOS at this point.
I'd definitely try the newer "aboot" version, but you report making it past the kernel+initrd load successfully. Back in 2007 when the rest of the Alpha community was having boot problems, we saw "unzip: invalid exec header" with an earlier message from "aboot" having the templatePossibly related: Are you both using aboot 0.9b? I found the following post on LKML:ii aboot 1.0~pre20040408-4 alpha Linux bootloader for the SRM consoleaboot: Can't load kernel. Memory at %lx - %lx (chunk %i) is %s
Curiously, I found I'm actually running aboot 0.9b, and it works with the kernel 4.4.2 build above (as well as Debian's build of 3.16). I have 1.0~pre20040408-4 installed, but didn't know about the need to update swriteboot.
For what it's worth, I've been running self-built kernels from the official kernel.org source tree since I first installed Debian on my Alpha way back when. My machine is no speed-demon either: builds are an overnight proposition, but they aren't anywhere near the 30 hours you're reporting :-(.Long ago I used to run self-built kernels, straight from the kernel.org tree, but the Debian packages became so much more convenient. (Anyone looking to sell 21264DP-class hardware?)
Thanks, -Alex