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

[Anthony Foiani]

Wolfgang --

Thank you for your prompt reply!  My apologies that I could not
address it sooner.

Wolfgang Denk <wd at denx.de> writes:
> Hm... did you not run the ELKD_MAKEDEV  (and ELDK_FIXOWNER ?)
> script(s) as documented?

I did ... eventually.

(When I first installed the ELDK on that machine, I intended to use it
only for cross-compilation, and not as any sort of a root disk.  I'd
forgotten that detail in the months since then, and got bit by it last
night.)

> Are you absolutely sure that your system is really running stable?
> symptoms like this are often caused by memory errors, whuich get
> triggered under high load (typically when the RAM gets accessed in
> burst mode more frequently).

I'm not entirely sure, but this isn't a pre-production board or
prototype -- it's a shipping product (Actis XCOM-9347).  And it will
happily run for months on the vendor's kernel and busybox-based
ramdisk.

(Granted, I wasn't stressing it in that mode, but the two boxes I
tried it on have both run the vendor kernel+ramdisk for literally
months of uptime.)

In the unstable configuration, I found that I could do small compile
with both gcc and g++ (e.g., "hello world", and a few-hundred-lines
graph path finder).  But when I tried to build boost, it would die
randomly.

(The first one would, anyway; the second box never managed to get to
the root prompt: it would successfully mount the ppc_6xx directory as
its root, but between that and the login prompt I would get an oops
claiming that 'swapper' got into trouble).

For what it's worth, "die randomly" was split about 50-50 between
"lock up the machine including networking, requiring a hard
reset/power cycle" and "perform a soft reset and go back to starting
up u-boot".  I couldn't find any particular pattern there.

I had separate difficulty with with /dev/pts and dropbear, but I'll
try to start another thread about that.

> See http://www.denx.de/wiki/view/DULG/LinuxCrashesRandomly

The errors weren't floating-point exceptions, at least not on the
first box.  I'll have to experiement with the second box to see if
that was the pattern there.

The SDRAM seems to be set up correctly by u-boot (again, supplied by
the vendor.)  They ship a debian root; I'll have to try again to see
if I can't figure out the differences, or if I can do stress tests on
the box running on the debian root.

Thank you very much for your assistance, and for providing such an
excellent set of tools for us to use.

Best regards,
Anthony Foiani