Heinz Schmidt wrote:
I'm trying to run the FireBee mint kernel from the dayly trunk build. But unfortunately it does not finish booting up. It stops after reading the mint.cnf. Then nothing else happens. I tried the trunk build from 14th, 17th and 20th of June. They all stop at the same point.
I have just replaced mintv4e.prg in my FireBee's MiNT setup with the one found in trunk-20072011.tar.bz2, and it works perfectly. No trouble.
There is no error output on the debugging (serial) console of the FireBee. The last output is related to the drives, nothing related to the booting mint at all.
This is normal. In my local source tree, I have a special debug.c to send debug output to the ColdFire serial port (I posted that file here some time ago, for information purpose). I have not committed it because it is still unclear how we will cleanly access the ColdFire serial port from FreeMiNT.
The exact same setup is booting well if I just replace the mintv4e.prg ba an older version dated 12th of June.
Be sure you don't have any filesystem of file corruption. If you have any doubt, check your filesystem on another computer (I use chkdsk on Windows), remove all the files, and copy the whole MiNT setup from a safe location.
So I guess there happened some changes in the mint kernel which prevent it from booting on the FireBee.
Not necessarily, it could be some filesystem trouble (FireTOS and EmuTOS FAT drivers are currently highly unreliable on big partitions). That may prevent the kernel itself to load cleanly into the memory. Personally I use a 509 MB C: partition with low FAT parameters (cluster size, etc.) but it is still bad, I get corruption with FireTOS/EmuTOS when I put too much files on it (more than a few megabytes). However I don't experience corruption after FreeMiNT is loaded (NEWFATFS seems to be reliable on big partitions).
Also, I suspect big corruption when FreeMiNT writes the MINT.INI file, when you play with the FreeMiNT boot menu (because NEWFATFS is not yet loaded).
For information, I send you the MINT.INI I use on my FireBee. It has DEBUG_LEVEL=2 to avoid all that debug output when there is no MINT.INI. DEBUG_DEVNO=8 to send debug output to the ColdFire serial port with my hacked debug.c, will be harmless on stock kernel. And INI_SAVE=NO do avoid filesystem corruption when I play with the boot menu.
You can sefely put that MINT.INI into your \mint\1-18-cur folder.Also, one difference could be the FireTOS version. I use the latest beta from Didier.
Good luck. -- Vincent Rivière
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