Jeremy Stanley wrote:
On 2013-01-17 19:44:41 +0000 (+0000), Mark Morgan Lloyd wrote: [...]So far I've not had any success with kernel options[...] It's been a few years since I did it on my Indy, but looks like you can just add "append" lines to arc.cf: http://www.linux-mips.org/wiki/ARCLoad#Usage
Wasn't that only relevant for ARCLoad rather than booting directly which I think is supposed to work for that architecture (http://www.linux-mips.org/wiki/IP27#ARC_firmware)? Perhaps that's something I should be exploring though...
Could still possibly be unsuccessfully trying to use a tty0 virtual terminal or something instead of ttyS0 by default. Also make sure the kernel's using the same baud as the firmware--your issue might just be a simple mismatch there (though random garbage after the count would have been a more likely symptom of that).
I'm pretty sure it's not a Baud issue: I still do a lot of serial comms and would have noticed that. It could /possibly/ be something like a control line (CTS/DSR/CD) not being pulled active, but I'm working via a null-modem which has worked well in the past on e.g. SPARC.
I think the prime contender at the moment is that it's trying to talk to an non-existent framebuffer, which is disappointing (other architectures are generally good at detecting this). If that's the case then I might find something useful if I can find the config (http://www.total-knowledge.com/progs/mips/kernels/, or referring to the current Debian CD).
Or it could just be crashing, which would be really disappointing. -- Mark Morgan Lloyd markMLl .AT. telemetry.co .DOT. uk [Opinions above are the author's, not those of his employers or colleagues]