I'm pleased to announce that Linux is _nearly_ working
completely on an EB164. Thanks to Jay Estabrook and Joe
Martin, the illegal instruction problems have been fixed.
New images will appear on Gatekeeper (Miniloader/eb164)
overnight. I've provided a full source tree rather than
a patch file as the changes needed are not compatible with
EV4 based systems. I'm sure that Linus has views on how the
code should go in but I think there should be seperation based
on generation of Alpha chip.
The changes required were all to do with ASNs. EV5 allows
finer control of page table entries and associated with each
page table entry is an 8-bit ASN that should be unique for the
set of active processes. The fact that there are less ASNs than
there are possible processes means that some form of dynamic
ASN allocation is needed whenever you swap context. The illegal
instruction problems were as a result of not properly flushing
a given process's page table entries when it was swapped out.
There are still a few problems; notably the Red Hat startup
hangs when clock runs (memory map problems) and there's no machine
check handling code. I am able to boot the EB164, configure and
build linux and milo, use the network and so on, all without
problems.
Dave
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David A Rusling david.rusling@reo.mts.dec.com
Principal Engineer Digital Equipment Co. Limited
European Semiconductor P.O. BOX 121
Applications Engineering Imperial Way,
Worton Grange
Reading RG2 0TU
UK
UK-(0)1734-204380
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