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Bug#711135: Re: compiling a bootable kernel for ia64 (itanium2, mckinley, rx2620)

Cross-posted to 3 groups.

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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.

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Thread

Bug#711135: Re: compiling a bootable kernel for ia64 (itanium2, mckinley, rx2620) Ivan Zakharyaschev <imz@altlinux.org> - 2018-02-05 02:00 +0100
  Bug#711135: Re: compiling a bootable kernel for ia64 (itanium2, mckinley, rx2620) Ben Hutchings <ben@decadent.org.uk> - 2018-02-05 02:10 +0100
  Bug#711135: Re: compiling a bootable kernel for ia64 (itanium2, mckinley, rx2620) Jason Duerstock <jason.duerstock@gmail.com> - 2018-02-05 02:20 +0100
    Bug#711135: Re: compiling a bootable kernel for ia64 (itanium2, mckinley, rx2620) Ivan Zakharyaschev <imz@altlinux.org> - 2018-02-05 03:20 +0100
    Bug#711135: Re: compiling a bootable kernel for ia64 (itanium2, mckinley, rx2620) Ivan Zakharyaschev <imz@altlinux.org> - 2018-02-07 20:00 +0100
  Bug#711135: compiling a bootable kernel for ia64 (itanium2, mckinley, rx2620) John Paul Adrian Glaubitz <glaubitz@physik.fu-berlin.de> - 2018-02-05 09:10 +0100

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