[ELDK] hard freeze / spontaneous reboot in native compiles (ELDK 4.2, PPC6xx, NFS root)

[Anthony Foiani]

Greetings.

I'm using the ppc-6xx portion of ELDK 4.2 as an NFS root on a system
that U-Boot 2009.06 detects as:

  CPU:   e300c1, MPC8347_PBGA_EA, Rev: 3.0 at 400 MHz, CSB: 266.667 MHz

After adding a /dev directory and a few nodes, I successfully got
Linux running with an nfs root consisting of the ppc-6xx branch of an
ELDK 4.2 install.  Once running, Linux detects the hardware as:

  # uname -a
  Linux xxx 2.6.30.4 #1 Fri Sep 4 17:31:03 CEST 2009 ppc ppc ppc GNU/Linux

  # cat /proc/cpuinfo 
  processor       : 0
  cpu             : e300c1
  clock           : 399.999996MHz
  revision        : 3.0 (pvr 8083 0030)
  bogomips        : 133.12
  timebase        : 66666666
  platform        : MPC834x MDS
  model           : MPC8349EMDS
  Memory          : 512 MB

My current goal is to build the boost libraries natively.  However,
when I try to do anything with the boost tools, the box locks up
within a few seconds -- no oops message, no nothing.  Sometimes it
will automatically reboot, other times it'll just sit there.

This happens whether I'm building as root or as a regular user; also,
it doesn't seem to matter whether I'm connecting via serial console or
if I'm coming in over dropbear ssh.

Looking at the output from 'free' (once per second) in another window,
it seems that there is plenty of memory left (of that 512 MiB, there's
still 400+ available).

Not sure where to go from here.  Will probably try to find a hard
drive that I can connect directly to the embedded system, to try to
use that as a root filesystem (in case there's an issue with NFS).

(For that matter, I have a PowerBook G4 with Fedora 12 installed on
it; I might have better luck building a root disk for this project
there...)

Meanwhile, if anyone has any ideas, I would be delighted to hear them.
Thank you very much in advance.

Best regards,
Anthony