Hi, On Sun, 2016-01-17 at 06:39 +0100, David Kuehling wrote: > long time ago I was told that I need a newer PMON to boot recent linux > kernels [5], but then read on debian-mips about problems after PMON > upgrades [1]. > > I'm tired of running an ancient 3.5 linux kernel on my Loongson-3A > system. Are there any updates about the PMON vs. kernel situation? > Anybody knows where I can find the latest *official* PMON 4.0.1 binary? > Googeling around, I found [2-4], which aren't even byte-for-byte equal. Firstly this is all from memory since I haven't dealt with these machines for some time now and things may have changed (or I might have forgotten something). So the old PMON in those machines (only itx-a1101) has a bug where it loads the kernel at an address to close to the address the bootloader is stored at. If the kernel being loaded has a large bss section (or is large in memory for any reason), PMON will overwrite itself and crash. The bug appeared after this kernel commit: https://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/commit/?id=c46173183657bbdbe0d54a981c28807581648422which increased the size of the bss section to something like 20M on all Loongson 3 kernels. Back then I tried using PMON 4.something but it wouldn't boot any kernel I threw at it. In the end I patched the kernel to reduce the value of MAX_PHYSMEM_BITS from 48 to 35 and it worked again - I think this should be ok on all Loongson 3A machines. Hopefully if you try that, any recent kernel will work with the old PMON. > According to /proc/cpuinfo my system is a : > > system type : lemote-3a-itx-a1101 > processor : 0 > cpu model : ICT Loongson-3A V0.5 FPU V0.1 > > My invoice says something like "Lemote Xinghuo 6100 Desktop" (I think in > chinese it's "星火 6100"). This was bought in November 2013. > > I see that debian archives now carry linux-image-3.16.0-4-loongson-3 . > What are my chances to use this kernel on my system? I think the kernel in jessie has the 3B patched backported to it so I would guess it won't work - but you could try it anyway :) James
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