[Debootloaders-silo] Bug#589891: silo: No more boots on UltraSparc 10: "Fast Data Access MMU Miss"

[Jurij Smakov]

On Mon, Jul 26, 2010 at 11:55:34PM +0200, Axel Beckert wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> Jurij Smakov wrote:
> > The only major change in SILO since the stable version is the switch 
> > from gcc-2.95 to the default gcc (4.3). The rest of the changes should 
> > be pretty benign, mostly related to the changes in libc headers which 
> > were breaking the ability to build SILO from source. Next week I'll 
> > try to prepare a few versions for you to test, the one built with the 
> > old compiler, and with various suspicious patches backed out.
> > 
> > In the meantime, please test whether you can reproduce the problem 
> > with 1.4.14+git20100207-1 - this will narrow the field somewhat.
> 
> That one works fine, indeed.

That's a bit mysterious, as there are no code changes between 
1.4.14+git20100207-1 and the latest version, just some Debian patches 
got merged upstream.

I've checked and the fact that second.b is different from the version 
shipped in the package is fine, as it gets modified during the 
installation.

By the way, do you see any of the letters 'SILO' printed on your 
screen before the error message (they might be not separated from the 
error message by any line breaks)? These are printed (one-by-one) by 
various functions in the first-stage boot loader to indicate its 
progress, so it would be good to know if you seen any of them.

Finally, assuming that the failure is actually in the first-stage boot 
loader (i.e. none or only some of the 'SILO' letters get printed on 
your screen), it would be useful to get a snapshot of the boot loader 
in the working and non-working configuration. You can use the 
following command to get it (assuming that your hard drive is 
/dev/sdb):

sudo dd if=/dev/sdb skip=1 bs=512 of=first.b count=1

If they are different in two cases, please attach them to the bug 
report, it can help us understand what's going on.

Best regards,
-- 
Jurij Smakov                                           jurij at wooyd.org
Key: http://www.wooyd.org/pgpkey/                      KeyID: C99E03CC