[LinuxBIOS] tyan s2881 - partial success

[Ward Vandewege]

So, with some help from Yinghai today, I finally managed to make my own
working LinuxBIOS image, and boot it on the s2881. Fantastic!

It cut boot time roughly in half - and that's without doing any optimizing of
the init startup sequence, which now takes up the bulk of the bootup time.

Anyway. Once the system booted, I tested network access and a few other
things, and everything seemed to work just fine.

But 10 minutes later the machine was no longer pingable, and I didn't get any
response on the serial console anymore either.

I shut it down, and restarted with LinuxBIOS. At this point, it would not
boot anymore - as you can see in the attached serial log, it just decides to
restart its fallback image just after init starts, which then hangs the box.

Any clues? This is the latest svn revision (2145), with Etherboot 5.4.1 +
FILO to boot from the local SATA drive.

I rebooted with the proprietary BIOS, which brought the box up just fine
(after complaining that it had to reset the CMOS). It started re-syncing the
software RAID array right after boot though, so maybe that is related to the
linuxBIOS hang upon boot, which is right after the kernel starts the RAID
devices?

I won't be able to work more on the box for the next week or two
(holidays...), but I thought I'd better signal this now.

Thanks,
Ward.