Subject: 2.0.30

From: Matthew Wilcox <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 25 May 1997 16:47:29 +0100 (BST)

On Friday, I decided the time had come to actually start running Linux/ARM
myself.  So I downloaded pretty much everything in sight from the ftp
site.. problems: 

The patch against gcc 2.7.2.2 doesn't apply cleanly - some of the patching
appears to have already been done.  This *was* against a clean untar of
2.7.2.2 that had been patched from 2.7.2.1.  And the t-linux fragment
needs to have CROSS_LIBGCC defined, not LIBGCC.  or something similar. 
Knew I should have written everything down.  It's easy to deduce what went
wrong by comparing it against t-semi. 

The patch against binutils 2.7 applies (after I found a virgin copy of
binutils 2.7, any chance of a patch against 2.8 any time soon?) but it
refuses to link the bfd/libbfd.so.2.7.  The Make crashes somewhere in
opcodes directory complaining about multiple symbols defined.  It works
fine for an arm-semi-aout target. 

And the a5k kernel provided doesn't work.  The bootloader complains about
bad magic (EA000006) and refuses to boot it.  The first word in the kernel
is indeed a branch instruction.  I tried executing it under RISC OS, but
it addressexceptioned and a few minutes later my machine hang.  Not
terribly surprised, but I thought I'd try it. 

BTW, does this kernel support netbooting?  The only supported device I
have is an Acorn Ether3, linked to a 486 Linux box running 2.0.30, so I
was hoping to NFS mount my root partition.  Yes, I'm on an A440 so no
device drivers are available.  And is the source code on the ftp site?  I
didn't see it, but I may have overlooked it.