On Mon, 5 Feb 2018, Ivan Zakharyaschev wrote:
On Sun, 4 Feb 2018, Frank Scheiner wrote:just a quick pointer: I had Debian Wheezy with Linux v3.2.x (vmlinuz-3.2.0-4-mckinley, i.e. [this one]) running w/o issues on my rx2620 with two Itanium 2 9040 (Montecito) both from an on-disk installation and a NFS root FS, but I ran it on bare-metal, not in a VM.Yes, [this one] doesn't boot on our system. It might even be in our case a strange/buggy behavior caused by old firmware for an otherwise correct kernel binary code (or, of course, the code might be not correct). Perhaps, there is a difference between yours and ours machines:root@rx2620:~# cat /proc/cpuinfo processor : 0 vendor : GenuineIntel arch : IA-64 family : 31 model : 2 model name : Madison up to 9M cache revision : 1 archrev : 0 features : branchlong cpu number : 0 cpu regs : 4 cpu MHz : 1600.021 itc MHz : 1600.021752 BogoMIPS : 2390.01 siblings : 1 physical id: 0 processor : 1 vendor : GenuineIntel arch : IA-64 family : 31 model : 2 model name : Madison up to 9M cache revision : 1 archrev : 0 features : branchlong cpu number : 0 cpu regs : 4 cpu MHz : 1600.021 itc MHz : 1600.021752 BogoMIPS : 2390.01 siblings : 1 physical id: 1 root@rx2620:~#It looks like ours has 2 Madison CPUs (if we are to trust this cpuinfo), which are older than your Montecito ones.
[this one]: https://packages.debian.org/wheezy/linux-image-3.2.0-4-mckinleyAs for gathering information, I can't think of some useful information from a working system so far. The same applies to testing. We are able to test it here. Anyway, thanks for your messages, Frank and Daniel! The remaining useful tasks which I see are:1) learn how to compile a bootable kernel for this machine and apply this knowledge to compile a fresh current kernel;2) understand what goes wrong (by bisecting gcc), suggest a fix. (Before we understand it, we can't be sure what should be fixed: it's not necessarily abug in gcc).So far, we've done a number of attempts to compile and boot a kernel (I'm going to post the details and the kernels soon), and my conclusion so far is that the only affecting factor is the version of gcc (even not -O1 vs -Os/-O2).gcc <= 4.5.3 produces a bootable kernel (as for linux-image-3.2.0-4-mckinley, gcc 4.4.7 from wheezy and gcc 4.5.3 from snapshots produced a bootable one in my experiments);gcc > = 4.6.3 produces a non-bootable kernel. So this already gives an initial hypothesis about the solution to 1): To compile a bootable kernel for this machine, use gcc <= 4.5.3.
Now that we know how to build a bootable kernel for such machines as ours (rx2620 with Madison CPU) and probably Daniel Kasza's rx2600, can such an update be published for wheezy?
Perhaps, an additional variant of linux-image-mckinley built with gcc-4.4 (4.4.7) present in wheezy? As a workaround for this bug.
And what about an updated installation image? So that people trying to install Debian on such a machine would succeed not only of they take the Debian 6 (squeeze) image (which is definitely not the first thing they would try when searching for an installation image), but so that Debian 7 (wheezy) images (more likely to be found by them) would work for them, too.