Dear Bob,
sorry, looks like I missed your mails to the debian-alpha list until now.
On 11/2/18 19:56, Bob Tracy wrote:
Additional info... Frank Scheiner reported similar badness on his PWS
back in March of 2017. See the "debian-alpha" archive link:
https://lists.debian.org/debian-alpha/2017/03/msg00007.html
Executive summary: SMP 4.x kernels work fine, but the generic Debian
kernel does *not* (or at least didn't at that time).
I can confirm this. I don't remember exactly when I tried the Debian 9
Sid installer image with 4.x generic kernel provided by Adrian, but I
remember that it produced the same result, i.e.:
```
[...]
halted CPU 0
halt code = 5
HALT instruction executed
[...]
```
I believe since then no newer installer image for Alpha was produced.
****
As a workaround, could it work to netboot the matching stock SMP kernel
(4.9.0-3) with the netboot installer initrd from [1]? I don't know how
to extract the initrd from the `netabootwrap`ed image though.
Or could it work to netboot the SMP kernel with the cdrom installer
initrd from [1] and the installer CDROM in the CDROM drive?
[1].
http://ftp.ports.debian.org/debian-ports/pool-alpha/main/d/debian-installer/debian-installer-images_20170615_alpha.tar.gz
****
Other approach: as per [2] hppa for example uses two kernels. So could
we just change [2] for alpha to also include the SMP kernel, with e.g.
that patch:
```
--- debian/installer/kernel-versions 2018-11-06 13:30:54.152319148 +0100
+++ debian/installer/kernel-versions-new 2018-11-06 13:31:38.992320296 +0100
@@ -1,5 +1,6 @@
# arch version flavour installedname suffix build-depends
alpha - alpha-generic - y -
+alpha - alpha-smp - y -
amd64 - amd64 - - -
arm64 - arm64 - - -
armel - marvell - y -
```
...and the installer images will also include the SMP kernel?
[2]:
https://salsa.debian.org/kernel-team/linux/raw/master/debian/installer/kernel-versions
Cheers,
Frank
