SS20 2.4 SMP, irregular boot freezes and swapon segfaults

[Nicolas WILL <nwill@houston.sns.slb.com>]

Hi all,

I managed to lay my hands on 2 cute machines:

SparcStation 5 (future firewall)
	110-MHz
	256-MB RAM
	2x 2.1-GB HDD
	CD
	Floppy
	TGX
	Soon QE or QFE

SparcStation 20 (future web/mail/dns server)
	2x 150-MHz 512-KB cache Ross HyperSparc
	128-MB RAM
	2x 2.1-GB HDD
	CD
	Floppy
	TGX

I'm running Debian Woody (stable) on both.

I had to use the boot floppies for the initial install as there seems to be
a known problem when booting from CD.

On my SS20 I compiled a 2.4.18 kernel with SMP support. I discovered that
the machine would boot beyond the simple kernel startup only once every 5 to
10 trys.

I then tried 2.4.19, then this week-end 2.4.20. Same problem. I used either
the kernel-source stable packages or direct source tarballs from kernel.org
with the same result.

No such problem on my ss5.

Any well know issue on that?



Another problem I have is with swapon under 2.4 kernel. It segfaults... swap
looks finely there as far as I know though.

swapoff seems fine and happy. swapon segfaults.... During startup or manual
command.

I guess I am not sure now if I have the same problem or not on my
ss5...sorry.

Any known issue on that?


If this is all covered in a good FAQ I didn;t manage to find, please just
direct me there.

Otherwise, I'll gladly accept your help.

In any case, thanks.

Nico