On Wed, 2 Nov 2005, Andrew Sharp wrote:
it will boot into SMP, but eventually fails with a "wrong magic" error.eventually fails in what way? during boot? after running for two weeks?
It's probably "cramfs: wrong magic", typical failure message when the kernel cannot find the initrd (identified by some 4-byte magic number) in the expected place. It might be that there is still some breakage in the memory copying routines, which I've hit before.
Reverting to Ross modules, if I build a standalone kernel I find it's too large to boot from disc, but I can boot it over the LAN (boot net root=/dev/sda2) and the system runs SMP reliably. However I notice that while the BogoMIPS rating of a single CPU is 150 when running SMP it's dropped to 104 per processor- I thought this was calibrated using a tight loop?
The old trick to reduce the size of the image on sparc32 to acceptable one is to run the following command on the image after the build:
strip -R .comment -R .note -K sun4u_init -K _end -K _start imageThis strips it of non-essential sections, decreasing its size quite dramatically.
I'm assuming that none of the core developers will be looking at this because of the age of the hardware, and I don't have the hardware information to even start making sense of this sort of problem. However as a workaround can anybody point me at the documentation that describes the Debian/SPARC-specific kernel rebuild procedure- running the standard "make vmlinux" gives me a kernel image of around 2Mb. My position is that I'm keen on promoting Sun kit for in-house use, but having to boot over the LAN makes it difficult to argue that they are a viable alternative to PCs, and if I'm not confident making that argument I'm not going to put my neck on the block and ask for money for newer systems.
I gave up on sparc32 after multiple attempts to make 2.6.11 and 2.6.12 work reliably on my Hypersparc system failed. I've recently got myself a new SS20 with hypersparc CPUs, so I'm currently trying to figure out how 2.6.14 will behave on it. Hopefully, I'll have something definite to say about by weekend, so stay tuned :-). I am pretty sure that SMP will not work though.
Best regards, Jurij Smakov jurij@wooyd.org Key: http://www.wooyd.org/pgpkey/ KeyID: C99E03CC