SGI O2 Jessie kernel issue

Dear list members,

I own a SGI O2 which is running as a shell-, mail- and webserver since 2006. The machine has 1 GB of RAM and two 72 GB hard disks configured as RAID-1 (md). CPU is R5000SC @ 180Mhz.

Recently I upgraded this machine from Squeeze to Wheezy and then to Jessie. I was very happy to see that arcboot now supports initrd loading (no self compiled kernels anymore).

Unfortunately the kernel from "linux-image-3.16.0-4-r5k-ip32_3.16.7-ckt20-1+deb8u3_mips“ does not boot. So I’m forced to use the kernel from Wheezy (3.2).

This is the behaviour: the machine stops right after "Starting ELF64 kernel“ and the status light turns red. No errors or anything else I can provide.

Is there any known issue with the Jessie kernel on the SGI O2?

Thanks for any help!

Michael