status of AVILA and CAMBRIA code

[John-Mark Gurney]

John Hay wrote this message on Wed, Feb 19, 2014 at 12:59 +0200:
> What is the status of AVILA and CAMBRIA builds in our tree? Have anybody
> had success recently? From the lists I can see that other people have
> also asked in September 2013, but I cannot figure out if there was any
> successes at that stage. :-)

The AVILA boards are known to have issues...  I still need to get
the off_t fixes into the tree (need to reread bde's last email on
it and act), and I've been seeing a panic, see message below w/ off_t
fix for it...

There is also a fix in the tree (not sure if it got merged) to address
the stack unwinding issue too...

> Currently we have some AVILA based systems running using FreeBSD-9 from
> January 2012. They are doing ok, but with the AVILAs be EOLed, we were
> thinking of using CAMBRIAs in the interrim and then start looking for
> some embedded board that can boot standalone, have an ethernet port
> and 3 X wifi (MiniPCI or something) and is supported by FreeBSD. :-)
> But that for another email.
> 
> So I thought the easiest will be to just build a CAMBRIA kernel from
> the same Jan 2012 tree and then share the user level binaries between
> the two. It look ok at first but then at random times, I would see
> "athX: ath_rx_proc: no mbuf!" messages and sometimes the wifi would
> stop receiving with a "athX: ath_rx_proc: couldn't restart RX after
> RXEOL; resetting" "ath_rx_proc: unable to start recv logic". I looked
> with netstat -m, but did not see an obvious problem, so decided it is
> time for an upgrade.
> 
> So I tried the latest current and latest 10-stable, but both AVILA and
> CAMBRIA kernels does not even print anything on the serial ports.

This is likely a gcc bug that didn't get merged to 10-stable:
http://svnweb.freebsd.org/changeset/base/r260565

> I then tried various older builds finding various problems:
> 
> Somewhere shortly after 2013-08-16 the kernel will panic with "Fatal
> kernel mode data abort: 'Alignment Fault 3'. I did not check if it
> was fixed later in the tree before the kernels stopped outputting to
> the serial port.

This should be addressed by when I commit my off_t fixes...

A quick fix is in:
https://www.freebsd.org/cgi/mid.cgi?20140113055215.GB2982@funkthat.com

but that is not what will be committed...

> On 2013-04-15 the kernel will stop after writing the gcc version 4.2.1
> message.

This is probably due to the gcc switch over to EABI...

> On 2013-03-20 creation of mdX ram disks for /etc and /var broke with
> a "mdmfs: newfs err 38" message. You can get past that by setting
> the vfs.unmapped_buf_allowed=0 tunable.
> 
> On 2012-01-25 svn 230553 remounting partitions rw->ro started to take
> so long that the longest AVILA watchdog setting will still reset the
> machine before the remounting is finished. Undoing that commit gets
> one past that. We normally keep the CF mounted ro and when we need to
> make changes mount it rw, make the change and then mount it ro again.
> 
> Somewhere along the line the ethernet npe0 device also broke, writing
> "npe0: npestart_locked: too many fragments 0". But I did not test the
> npe0 device with every build and only realised it this morning, so I
> do not know where it broke. :-)

Not sure about these issues...

-- 
  John-Mark Gurney				Voice: +1 415 225 5579

     "All that I will do, has been done, All that I have, has not."