On Wed, Nov 29, 2017 at 08:16:05AM +0000, Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton wrote:
On Tue, Nov 28, 2017 at 8:51 PM, Tzafrir Cohen tzafrir@cohens.org.il wrote:
Originally the issue was that it has failed to boot. Issues with the boot loader. What about those? An issue with kernel >= 4.9 or so.
my understanding was, when i looked at this, was it's something to do with how old-uboot initialises the processor.... can't remember the details. a "fix" was added as a parameter that allowed old-u-boot to boot newer kernels, and new-u-boot to boot older kernels.
however.... last year, when investigating, there was *another* issue, which is that somewhere around... i think it was 4.7rc1 ... it would systematically and totally unreliably come to a grinding halt at anywhere between 30 and 180 seconds into the boot.
i think i maybe did a HUNDRED AND FIFTY separate kernel compiles (git bisect and other techniques), trying for several DAYS to narrow down which commit was responsible, but because of the unreliability of the crashing it was near-impossible to narrow down. the best / closest i could get was something like, "4.7rc1 is fine, 4.7rc5 isn't".
since then whatever underlying bug is there MIGHT have been tracked down and fixed, as there were people who were vaaaguely aware of the problem, on other hardware.
Now I am confused. In this reply (http://lists.phcomp.co.uk/pipermail/arm-netbook/2017-May/013653.html) you have told me the reason for the kernel bug is/was a power instability. So I thought this is going to be fixed and said kernel bug is no more. Are there multiple kernel bugs?
kind regards Pablo