[U-Boot] Problems booting Linux 3.18 on SH7785LCR

[John Paul Adrian Glaubitz]

Hello!

I recently got Renesas SH7785LCR board which I am currently setting up
as a Debian porterbox for sh4. Currently, all sh4 build machines at
Debian for sh4 are running kernel 3.2.0 which is showing its age now,
especially since newer versions of udev are complaining about the
deprecated kernel.

Since I am setting up my SH7785LCR board as a new machine, I wanted to
start with a new kernel right away. But since I also don't have any
older base system which I could use, I need to use an updated kernel
anyway.

While I had no problems booting an old uImage with the aforementioned
3.2.0 kernel, I haven't had any success with kernel 3.18 so far. u-boot
loads the kernel, decompresses it but seems to perform a reset right
away:

U-Boot 2014.01 (Jan 30 2015 - 11:01:14)

CPU: SH4
BOARD: Renesas Technology Corp. R0P7785LC0011RL
DRAM:  384MB
Flash: 64MB
PCI: SH7780 PCI host bridge found.
PCI:   Bus Dev VenId DevId Class Int
  00:00.0     - 10ec:8169 - Network controller
  00:01.0     - 1095:3512 - Mass storage controller
In:    serial
Out:   serial
Err:   serial
Net:   RTL8169#0
=>

=> usb reset
(Re)start USB...
USB0:   scanning bus 0 for devices... 2 USB Device(s) found
       scanning usb for storage devices... 1 Storage Device(s) found
=> fatload usb 0:1 0x89000000 uImage-3.18
reading uImage-3.18
2977932 bytes read in 1690 ms (1.7 MiB/s)
=> pmb
=> bootm
## Booting kernel from Legacy Image at 89000000 ...
   Image Name:
   Image Type:   SuperH Linux Kernel Image (gzip compressed)
   Data Size:    2977868 Bytes = 2.8 MiB
   Load Address: 80001000
   Entry Point:  80002000
   Verifying Checksum ... OK
�  Uncompressing Kernel Image ... OK

U-Boot 2014.01 (Jan 30 2015 - 11:01:14)

CPU: SH4
BOARD: Renesas Technology Corp. R0P7785LC0011RL
DRAM:  384MB
Flash: 64MB
PCI: SH7780 PCI host bridge found.
PCI:   Bus Dev VenId DevId Class Int
  00:00.0     - 10ec:8169 - Network controller
  00:01.0     - 1095:3512 - Mass storage controller
In:    serial
Out:   serial
Err:   serial
Net:   RTL8169#0
=>

The 3.18 uImage was created by downloading the Debian kernel image
package for the SH7785LCR [1] and unpacking the package. Then I
created the uImage using the following command using the same loader
and entry address that are being set for the 3.2.0 uImage:

mkimage -A sh -O linux -a 0x80001000 -e 0x80002000 -d
vmlinuz-3.18.0-trunk-sh7785lcr.gz uImage-3.18

Does anyone know what could be wrong such that the kernel wouldn't
boot as shown above?

Cheers,
Adrian

> [1]
ftp://ftp.debian-ports.org/debian/pool-sh4/main/l/linux/linux-image-3.18.0-trunk-sh7785lcr_3.18.3-1~exp1_sh4.deb

-- 
 .''`.  John Paul Adrian Glaubitz
: :' :  Debian Developer - glaubitz at debian.org
`. `'   Freie Universitaet Berlin - glaubitz at physik.fu-berlin.de
  `-    GPG: 62FF 8A75 84E0 2956 9546  0006 7426 3B37 F5B5 F913