Having flashed the 2016.05-tld-1 uboot without incident I followed the directions from bodhi's excellent thread (Bodhi's Linux Kernel Kirkwood Thread) but my board simply refuses to boot. It seems to load the kernel and initrd from my flash drive fine and the checksums come back OK, but after it reaches the message "booting the kernel." it just stops.
I have tried this several times with different flash drives and I have observed the same behavior in all cases. The system just hangs with both the red and green LEDs on and no further output occurs on the serial console, nor does the disk access light blink on the flash drive.
Ultimately my goal is to be using a different distribution than Debian (if anyone has info on what makes the kirkwood kernels special I'd love to know it, I'd much rather boot a clean upstream kernel if possible), but I figure the most direct way to get there at the moment is to boot Debian and then swap out the userland before ultimately going the full custom image route. Of course if I can't boot at all I won't be making much progress!
Thanks in advance for any advice anyone might have.
UPDATE: Some more poking and I get some more info. On some boots I will get various messages like this:
The hex address changes between a handful of values and then it may boot after a few minutes. It seems to be random if this happens or not. I also get this message on some attempts:
The furthest its gotten so far is a kernel panic due to /dev/sda1 being unavailable. I suspect that this may be due to a bad image, but the drive comes up clean on my desktop and fsck reports no errors. The EHCI errors make me think that the timing might not be totally correct on the drive, but I have insufficient tooling to confirm this. I have these errors both with name brand drives and with cheap drives. I can procure a brand new drive to try this with if its likely the drive at fault.
For completeness, here is the boot log on the most successful attempt so far: https://hastebin.com/bonawimolu.vbs. Note that I had to run on early debugging to see any of that output, it was otherwise as described above with no output.
I have tried this several times with different flash drives and I have observed the same behavior in all cases. The system just hangs with both the red and green LEDs on and no further output occurs on the serial console, nor does the disk access light blink on the flash drive.
Ultimately my goal is to be using a different distribution than Debian (if anyone has info on what makes the kirkwood kernels special I'd love to know it, I'd much rather boot a clean upstream kernel if possible), but I figure the most direct way to get there at the moment is to boot Debian and then swap out the userland before ultimately going the full custom image route. Of course if I can't boot at all I won't be making much progress!
Thanks in advance for any advice anyone might have.
UPDATE: Some more poking and I get some more info. On some boots I will get various messages like this:
EHCI timed out on TD - token=0x1e008d80
The hex address changes between a handful of values and then it may boot after a few minutes. It seems to be random if this happens or not. I also get this message on some attempts:
** ext4fs_devread read error - block
The furthest its gotten so far is a kernel panic due to /dev/sda1 being unavailable. I suspect that this may be due to a bad image, but the drive comes up clean on my desktop and fsck reports no errors. The EHCI errors make me think that the timing might not be totally correct on the drive, but I have insufficient tooling to confirm this. I have these errors both with name brand drives and with cheap drives. I can procure a brand new drive to try this with if its likely the drive at fault.
For completeness, here is the boot log on the most successful attempt so far: https://hastebin.com/bonawimolu.vbs. Note that I had to run on early debugging to see any of that output, it was otherwise as described above with no output.