Re: Booting Debian in qemu-system-alpha

[Philippe Mathieu-Daudé]

On 1/24/20 9:52 PM, John Paul Adrian Glaubitz wrote:

On 1/24/20 9:19 PM, Richard Henderson wrote:

Oh.  Hah!  I just tried again, cutting and pasting your command-line.  You've
got unicode quotes, not ascii ' (\x27).  That gets passed through to the kernel
as-is and prevents console=ttyS0 from being parsed properly.


Good catch. That helped. Thanks.

I'm considering setting up two qemu-based buildds for alpha in the cloud now.


Nice!

Looking at cloud provider default plans, and problems with buildd on 
other archs (mipsel in particular) I recommend you to use at least 2GB 
instead of 512MB.

Re: [PATCH] 4.18-rc7 on alpha: bitsperlong issue

[Philippe Mathieu-Daudé]

Hi Bob,

On 1/21/19 10:42 PM, Bob Tracy wrote:
> Apologies for what is essentially a repost with a proper subject header
> in the sense of trying to get the attention of people who collect/approve
> patches for submission upstream.  See my posting from earlier today
> (followup: [FTBFS] kernel 4.18-rc7 bitsperlong.h issue on alpha) for the
> back story.  As mentioned there, this patch applies cleanly to at least
> all mainline kernel source trees >= version 4.18.
> 
> Further apologies for including the patch as an attachment, but I don't
> trust my mailer not to impose unintended formatting.
> 
> --Bob
> 
> Signed-off-by: Bob Tracy 
> Tested-by: Bob Tracy 

With your "Signed-off-by" tag, the "Tested-by" tag is implicit,
it is expected patches are at least tested by the contributor ;)

That said,
Reviewed-by: Philippe Mathieu-Daudé 

Thanks for fixing this,

Phil.

Re: Use SMP kernel for Alpha (udeb) builds

[Philippe Mathieu-Daudé]

Hi Frank,

On 12/4/18 5:38 PM, Frank Scheiner wrote:
> Dear all,
> 
> As per [1] and our recent discussions the generic 4.x kernels seem to no
> longer work on Alpha machines which also renders any installer images
> using the generic 4.x kernels non-working.
> 
> [1]: https://lists.debian.org/debian-alpha/2017/03/msg7.html
> 
> Confirmed on:
> * AlphaStation 200 (w/EV4 x 1)
> * AlphaStation 255 (w/EV45 x 1)
> * Personal Workstation 500au (w/EV56 x 1)
> * AlphaServer DS20E (w/EV67 x 2)
> 
> Also expected on:
> * AXPpci33 (w/LCA4 x 1)
> * AlphaStation 500 (w/EV56 x 1)
> * AlphaServer DS25 (w/EV68CB x 2)
> * AlphaServer ES45 (w/EV68CB x 4)
> 
> The following two patches should switch the used kernels to the SMP
> version. As:
> 
> (1) I don't exactly know how to build images using multiple kernels
> (i.e. what happens if $TEMP_KERNEL has multiple kernel names in it,
> which seems to be supported according to [2], will the image creation in
> e.g. [3] than run multiple times automatically?) and I don't want to
> break things,
> 
> [2]:
> https://salsa.debian.org/installer-team/debian-installer/blob/master/build/config/dir#L79
> 
> 
> [3]:
> https://salsa.debian.org/installer-team/debian-installer/blob/master/build/config/alpha/netboot.cfg
> 
> 
> (2) I can't find a similar example for another architecture and
> 
> (3) the images with the generic kernels are non-working anyhow,
> 
> ...I just omitted the generic ones for now.
> 
> This is sort of a workaround and does not fix the actual problem which
> is yet unknown, but I believe getting working installer images is more
> important at the moment. With working installer images more people could
> get involved and maybe sometime in the future someone has enough time
> and effort to invest in fixing the actual problem.
> 
> ## Patches ##
> 
> 1.
> https://salsa.debian.org/frank-scheiner-guest/linux/commit/865cacfd7722b346629082ab3094b6ad93964095
> 
> 
> 2.
> https://salsa.debian.org/frank-scheiner-guest/debian-installer/commit/7269679bec8bae997ef5ed7619e9f8df2e184134
> 
> 
> I think both patches are already enough to produce the needed alpha-smp
> udebs and will allow to produce working installer images (e.g. netboot
> images might work instantly and could be an alternative way for Bob to
> reinstall his PWS).
> 
> What do you think? Is there anything obvious missing?

FYI I've added few tests to QEMU to avoid regressions, one is booting
the DP264 machine (not yet merged, the specific test is here:)
https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/qemu-devel/2018-04/msg03082.html

I tested a recent Debian SMP kernel and got:

alpha-softmmu/qemu-system-alpha \
  -kernel vmlinuz-4.18.0-3-alpha-generic \
  -append console=srm -initrd initrd.gz \
  -nographic -net nic -net user -d mmu,unimp \
  -drive file=debian-503-alpha-businesscard.iso,if=ide,media=cdrom
PCI: 00:00:0 class 0300 id 1013:00b8
PCI:   region 0: 1000
PCI:   region 1: 1200
PCI: 00:01:0 class 0200 id 8086:100e
PCI:   region 0: 1202
PCI:   region 1: c000
PCI: 00:02:0 class 0101 id 1095:0646
PCI:   region 0: c040
PCI:   region 1: c048
PCI:   region 3: c04c
[0.00] Linux version 4.18.0-3-alpha-generic
(debian-ker...@lists.debian.org) (gcc version 7.3.0 (Debian 7.3.0-30))
#1 Debian 4.18.20-2 (2018-11-23)
[0.00] bootconsole [srm0] enabled
[0.00] Booting GENERIC on Tsunami variation Clipper using
machine vector Clipper from SRM
[0.00] Major Options: MAGIC_SYSRQ
[0.00] Command line: console=srm
[0.00] memcluster 0, usage 1, start0, end   14
[0.00] memcluster 1, usage 0, start   14, end16384
[0.00] freeing pages 14:2048
[0.00] freeing pages 4332:16384
[0.00] reserving pages 4332:4333
[0.00] Initial ramdisk at: 0x(ptrval) (5079886 bytes)
[0.00] Built 1 zonelists, mobility grouping on.  Total pages: 16256
[0.00] Kernel command line: console=srm
[0.00] Dentry cache hash table entries: 16384 (order: 4, 131072
bytes)
[0.00] Inode-cache hash table entries: 8192 (order: 3, 65536 bytes)
[0.00] Sorting __ex_table...
[0.00] Memory: 106304K/131072K available (6642K kernel code,
8709K rwdata, 2080K rodata, 352K init, 393K bss, 24768K reserved, 0K
cma-reserved)
[0.00] random: get_random_u64 called from
__kmem_cache_create+0x5c/0x620 with crng_init=0
[0.00] SLUB: HWalign=64, Order=0-3, MinObjects=0, CPUs=1, Nodes=1
[0.00] NR_IRQS: 32784
[0.00] clocksource: qemu: mask: 0x max_cycles:
0x1cd42e4dffb, max_idle_ns: 881590591483 ns
[0.003906] [ cut here ]
[0.004882] WARNING: CPU: 0 PID: 0 at
/build/linux-kQe68U/linux-4.18.20/init/main.c:650 start_kernel+0x4dc/0x754
[0.004882] Interrupts were enabled early
[0.004882] Modules linked in:
[0.005859] CPU: 0 PID: 0 Comm: swapper Not tainted
4.18.0-3-alpha-generic #1 Debian 4.18.20-2
[0.006835]fc00018f