Hello, Michael. On Thu, Dec 13, 2018 at 09:26:12PM +1300, Michael Cree wrote: > A kernel built for generic UP Alpha had been noted to fail to boot > for quite some time (since the release of 3.18). The kernel either > locks up before printing any messages to the console or just falls > back into the SRM with a HALT instruction again before any messages > are printed to the console. A work around is to either use a kernel > built for generic SMP or to build a machine specific kernel as these > boot correctly. > > Because there were other compile errors at the time it proved > difficult to bisect, but we are continuing to get complaints about > it as it renders the Debian Alpha installer somewhat useless, so I > returned to trying to find the problem and managed to bisect it to: > > commit b38d08f3181c5025a7ce84646494cc4748492a3b > Author: Tejun Heo <tj@xxxxxxxxxx> > Date: Tue Sep 2 14:46:02 2014 -0400 > > percpu: restructure locking > > Any suggestions as to what might be the problem and a fix? So, the only thing I can think of is that it's calling spin_unlock_irq() while irq handling isn't set up yet. Can you please try the followings? 1. Convert all spin_[un]lock_irq() to spin_lock_irqsave/unlock_irqrestore(). 2. If that still doesn't work, just convert all of them to spin_lock/unlock(), which is obviously broken but still is useful for debugging. Thanks. -- tejun
