In 2.6.20, I can boot an arm kernel up to a shell prompt including a virtual scsi hard drive. In 2.6.21-rc1, this stopped working.
I tried "git bisect" and found out there's a range of about 5000 commits between the two where arm doesn't compile. At the start of this range, the controller worked. At the end, it didn't anymore.
How can YOU reproduce this problem? I'm glad you asked:
The miniconfig I'm using is attached. You'll need an arm compiler to build it, of course. (If you haven't got one, the cross compiler I made is at "http://landley.net/code/firmware/downloads/cross-compiler/". Download the armv4l version for the appropriate host, extract the tarball and add the "bin" directory under that to your path. The x86 version should work on Ubuntu 6.06 or newer, the x86-64 version was built on 7.04.)
Configure with:
make ARCH=arm allnoconfig KCONFIG_ALLCONFIG=miniconfig-linux
make ARCH=arm CROSS_COMPILE=armv4l-
And then run qemu on it:
qemu-system-arm -M versatilepb -nographic -no-reboot \
-hda /dev/null -kernel zImage-armv4l -append \
'rw panic=1 root=/dev/sdaconsole=ttyAMA0'
The failing system will loop resetting the scsi controller with lots of timeouts, and takes several minutes to get the the panic where it can't mount root. The working system will panic due to root being /dev/null fairly quickly, without pages of error messages and a very long wait first.
Rob