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

Hi Jason,

On Sun, 4 Feb 2018, Jason Duerstock wrote:

> Does the kernel from here work for you?:
>
> https://people.debian.org/~jrtc27/wheezy-backports-ia64/
>
> Specifically https://people.debian.org/~jrtc27/wheezy-backports-ia64/linux-image-3.16.0-0.bpo.4-mckinley_3.16.39-1+deb8u1~bpo70+1+gcc4.4_ia64.deb

Yes, it works for our machine. Thanks!

It's amazing that you came to the same solution as regards the use of 
gcc-4.4 a while ago! If we could find it before, it'd have saved us some 
experiments. (The lack of a working installaton image which is easy to 
find was also discouraging at the first stage.)

> On Sun, Feb 4, 2018 at 7:56 PM, Ivan Zakharyaschev <[email protected]> wrote:

>>> 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.