[Aboriginal] armv6l broken in Aboriginal 1.4.5

[Rob Landley]

On 04/12/2016 11:51 AM, Sam Thursfield wrote:
> Hi!
> 
> It seems that the 1.4.5 Aboriginal image for armv6l doesn't work.

Yeah, sorry. The problem is the kernel needs a patch and the relevant
kconfig files changed so the old patch doesn't apply anymore. Fixing
it's been on my todo list for a while. (armv5l works.)

> All I see from the VM is this, after which it hangs with qemu-system-arm
> using 100% CPU:
> 
>     Uncompressing Linux... done, booting the kernel.
> 
> I've tried with qemu 2.3.1 (fedora 22) and also qemu master (commit
> 42bb626f).

It's not qemu, it'sthe linux kernel .config needs to select some symbols
that kconfig won't let it, so I have to patch the kernel's kconfig files.

> The armv5l image works as expected, and I found that if I remove '-cpu
> arm1136-r2' from the qemu commandline it can boot the armv6l image.

The default cpu qemu emulates is often newer than the target I'm trying
to build for, so if later instructions leak in (from things like the
kernel's inline assembly), it won't notice. The -cpu stuff tells it not
to support newer instructions, and it's catching that this image
presumably wouldn't run on real hardware, because the kernel config is
wrong.

That said, if all that's wrong is the kernel and you'd have to build
your own kernel for non-qemu hardware anyway...

> I can do further debugging if you have something specific you want me to
> try, but i'm not an expect in this area so i'm afraid this is a problem
> report with no proposed solution... hopefully it saves others from
> discovering this the hard way, in any case!

I need to fix it, I'm just swamped with todo items and the kernel is a
moving taget...

> Sam

Rob