SGI Octane kernel patches fail

Hi,

I have a SGI Octane IP30 and was able to boot Linux on it with the ip30-r10k+-20050128.img Gentoo kernel. Nevertheless I noticed that this kernel is very unstable.

Once I was lucky and able to bootstrap Debian before the kernel paniced again (usually a "unaligned instruction access in arch/mips/kernel/unaligned.c::do_ade, line 544[#3]").

I tried to compile a newer 2.6.19-rc1 kernel and applied the two IOC3 and IP30 patches from ftp://ftp.linux-mips.org/pub/linux/mips/people/skylark/. First of all the patch fails slightly and needs manual adjustments. Compiling results in an error, do_IRQ() is called with only one parameter instead of two.

So I wonder what kernels are compatible with linux-mips-2.6.19-rc1-ip30-r28.patch.bz2. Do I need other patches as well? Also the kernel config file skylark-approved-config-tm in skylark/ is out of date. It seems to match a 2.6.12 or similar version.

PS: Please CC: me.

Jens

Yes, that kernel is ancient and known to be totally broken. Try
http://dev.gentoo.org/~kumba/mips/netboot/testing/ip30-r10k+-20060112.img.bz2
instead.

-Steve

Ah, it works fine with linux-2.6.19 (it was trivial to crosscompile). So it seems the names of the patches are just wrong.

I still fail to mount the root fs via NFS (tcpdump reports no network transfer after loading the kernel) and to have root on a local hard disk:

[17179594.972000] XFS: file system using version 1 directory format
[17179595.044000] XFS: SB validate failed
[17179595.092000] VFS: Cannot open root device "sdb8" or unknown-block(8,24)
[17179595.172000] Please append a correct "root=" boot option
[17179595.240000] Kernel panic - not syncing: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on unknown-block(8,24)

I need to check this "SB validation". But I'm sure I'm able to embed an initrd into the kernel as this works already with the old Gentoo kernel.

Jens