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-mckinley
As 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.
