changed distributions, kernel not working..

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originally posted by jdhar@Feb 13 2006, 09:22 PM

my server suffered a little internal fire recently (note, fans are more valuable than you think!), so i had to setup a new box, and i decided to switch linux distributions from slackware to ubuntu.

i rebuilt the toolchain the way i always have (i'm using the older version from marcs page, not the newer ones), and built a new kernel image... but it won't work on my board; it won't even start to boot (nothing happens after i run the terminal). to see if it was hardware, i used the same sof image and downloaded an older vmlinux binary that i had, and it worked, indicating it wasn't hardware. i then recompiled that same vmlinux binary with the same config file used to generate it originally, and the new image didn't work. this really seems like a toolchain build problem, and i thought maybe because i'm using different versions of everything to compile. for reference, im' using gcc 3.3.6 (but i configure buildroot to use 3.4.3).

any ideas?

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No one has any suggestions? I was thinking that maybe it was because I switched to an AMD64-bit architecture. If I extract old toolchain binaries that I have lying around, I can&#39;t execute them (when I try, I just get &#39;no such file or directory&#39;), which is very odd; is there something specific ni the toolchain build that targets only 32-bit architectures, or should this not matter?

Hi Jdhar,

Maybe you should try Fedora, they have x86_64 port. I am using FC5 test2, and yum update.

They have the latest kernel and drivers to support newer boards. I think Ubuntu is not targeted for a development platform.

jdhar,

Even in the 64-bit port of Quartus II on Linux, a fair amount of the tool runs in 32-bit mode. You can easily determine which binaries are 32-bit and which are 64-bit by performing a &#39;file&#39; command on them.

Now, directly to your question....most, if not all, of the toolchain is 32-bit code. It does successfully run on 64-bit architectures through a 32-bit "emulation" layer.

I&#39;m using an amd64 version of Gentoo Linux with no issues.

I would suspect that you have some sort of installation or environment issue causing your problem.

Cheers,

- slacker

Thanks for the replies... I can&#39;t just switch to Fedora because I don&#39;t know that much about the distro, and it&#39;s my server so i need to be able to administer it well. Ubuntu isn&#39;t much different than debian, so I&#39;m familiar with that.

Anyway, I reinstalled it with the 32-bit kernel instead of the 64, and it worked, so it must be related somehow. I don&#39;t think the problem is with running 32-bit executables; as you said, you can do that through an emulation layer... most of the executables i was using were for 32-bit machines. But something to do with GCC and the toolchain build is where it goes wrong... I did some reading, and there are definitely some things to watch out for. But if you have it working on a 64-bit machine, then it could possibly be some setup issue, just not sure what.

I don&#39;t need the performance of 64-bit (Im&#39; not really convinced it&#39;s much better anyway), so the 32-bit kernel is fine.

Hippo, why do you think that UBuntu is not targeted for a dev environment? There are two modes of installation, user and server. User is very &#39;mandrake&#39; like... nice interface, installs everything you could imagine... but server is a lot better, and the packages make it much easier. Just curious to see what&#39;s wrong with it...

J

Hi Jdhar,

I may be wrong about UBuntu. I should not say that without actually running it for some time. I will try it on a 64 bits machine.