Hi again,
I just tried the romimage - It didn't work! Well, the LinuxBIOS booted and everything looked OK up until the same point as I have seen before from my builds; elfboot is started, but the payload seems completely dead... :-( Since I saw the payload in the romimage was etherboot, I also hooked up the ethernet and started sniffing it with ethereal, but no packets were ever sent on the ethernet. I have also checked that nothing comes out on the VGA console. My conclusion is that the Etherboot payload either never is reached, or crashes at an early stage.
Well, I guess this anyway gives me lots of hints by ruling out all the doubts I had about my config and build process; now I guess there must be something different between our Smartcore-P5 based hardwares...
Could I please ask you to check what cardtype/revision you're using? My HW config looks as follows: DigitalLogic MSM-P5SEN, V3.9, Rev A. It's also marked 03.04 which I guess is the manufacturing date(?) This card has a SmartCore-P5 module clocked at 166MHz. There is only one Revision label on this module, but it has no revision mark on it... The MSM-P5SEN variant comes without VGA cirquitry, but I have also tried LinuxBIOS on the VGA-equipped variant we have around here with the same result. The onboard Flash is a Winbond 29C020CP (i.e 256kB), but LinuxBIOS boots equally well also from 128kB and 512kB flashes I've tried in the socket. The card has one SDRAM slot, which we have equipped with a 128MB large module.
Looking for simple answers; could you possibly be using a different size (larger) RAM, and could the elfboot for this platform have some code fragments not checking the detected RAM size so that it relocates the payload out inito the void?