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From: Marty C. <md...@th...> - 2002-01-30 06:13:35
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On 1/29/2002 9:31 AM Hanna James P Civ AFRL/IFTC Jam...@rl... wrote: >Thanks for the suggestion Ken. I downloaded the boot image for the SMC >1211 >and burned a new CD. The CD booted and DHCP'd and loaded the kernel. Excellent! You're on your way. You've made me think of something, and I wanted to mention it in case anyone wants to do some further investigation: One of the main manifestation of GCC bugs when compiling Etherboot is that the packet transmission buffer is corrupted. I think the bug has something to do with certain versions of GCC not respecting alignment requests. For example, here is the directive to allocate the transmit buffer in rtl8139.c: static unsigned char tx_buffer[TX_BUF_SIZE] __attribute__((aligned(4))); I'm wondering if GCC 2.96 (and possibly other versions) fail to align this buffer properly, which makes the card unable to properly do DMA with it. I can reliably get this to occur by trying to compile an rtl8139 lzrom image with gcc 2.96. Curiously the floppy version will work, but when I burn a ROM with the .lzrom file, it fails. I'd love to know that the difference is. I am betting that it is something we could work around by doing our own pointer arithmetic and saying something (roughly) like: static unsigned char tx_buffer[TX_BUF_SIZE+4]; (char *) tx_buffer &= 0xFFFFFFF0; This is a guess, but the kind of bugs we're seeing seem to suggest possibly blown alignment. >The problem that I am having now is that when the kernel tries to bring up >the network interface it can't. A message is printed about the 3c59x >network >driver with a link to scyld software. It seems to be expecting the box to >have a 3COM card in it even though it mentions the RTL8138 before the >successful DHCP???!!!!??? >Am I still doing something wrong??? >SIGHUH This looks like the wrong kernel. Try the one at: http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/ltsp/lts_kernel_rtl8139-2.2.tgz There is a vmlinuz.all kernel that does not work with rtl8139 cards, though it seems like it ought to. If you haven't already, you should check out: http://www.ltsp.org/ where there is a wealth of information on setting up network booted workstations. Once the kernel is loaded, Etherboot has mostly completed its work, and that's where other projects do their magic. I hope this is helpful to you, and let us (the list) know how things go. Marty --- Try: http://rom-o-matic.net/ to make Etherboot images instantly. Name: Marty Connor US Mail: Entity Cyber, Inc.; P.O. Box 391827; Cambridge, MA 02139; USA Voice: (617) 491-6935, Fax: (617) 491-7046 Email: md...@th... Web: http://www.thinguin.org/ |
