Re: Linux hanging on Xilinx SystemACE

On Wed, 2006-08-16 at 15:48 -0600, Grant Likely wrote:

On 8/16/06, Clint Thomas [off-list ref] wrote:

quoted

Hey,

Using the powerpc development tree of Linux 2.4, I am trying to boot my
system from CompactFlash using Xilinx SystemACE. My compact flash card has
two partitions, a 16MB FAT16 that holds the combination FPGA image / Linux
Kernel ELF file, and an Ext2 partition that holds the root file system. The
system starts the boot process, uncompresses the Linux kernel and begins
loading drivers. Part way into this process, it conducts a partition check
of the drive being reported to it by SystemACE, however, it hangs at that
point. No kernel panic, no error message, it simply hangs. Here is the
output at that point...

Partition check:
 xsysacea:

what I am trying to find out is if this problem has been seen/fixed in the
past? or did I format the CF card incorrectly?

I forgot to mention that we used to see this problem when the identify
command that is sent during intialization fails.  The driver is written
in such a way that if any of this fails, the system hangs because it
sits in a polling loop waiting for the correct response.  There are no
timeout failures... :(  In our case we saw this error because we forgot
to put a CF into the system [usually during development with NFS
rootfs].

It is fairly easy to printk() the drivers init code to find out which
step is stuck in the polling loop.

Checking partitions is a user-space activity (fsck).  Remove it from
your init scripts.  Besides, unless your using a microdrive, your ext2
rootfs should be mounted read-only which greatly reduces the need for
fsck.  (because FLASH will wear out after too many writes)

The partition check he is referring to is part of a block device driver
initialization.  It is not fsck.  If he were only so luck to be that far
in the startup sequence... :)



Jeff Angielski
The PTR Group