Gentoo on an DEC Alpha Miata - Segmentation Faults

doalwa · 2.6.10 .config file:

Hi Peeps,

a few weeks ago I got my hands on a really nice Alpha machine. It's a DEC Alpha Miata.
Before I installed Gentoo on this beast, I was running FreeBSD and NetBSD on it, without any problems. The only modifications I did to this machine was to replace the built-in TGA graphics card with a generic Matrox Millenium PCI card and to swap the supplied 4,5 GB SCSI HD with a 9,1 GB IBM SCSI HD...so far so good!

The installation of Gentoo was also pretty uneventfull...I did a Stage 1 install, emerged system, installed Xorg-x11 and xfce4, compiled development-sources-2.6.10 and rebooted. I worked on the Alpha for some minutes, when suddenly everyting stopped working..opening a new instance of xterm, or trying to login as a new user only gave me back a segmentation fault! I am posting this from my alpha from within xfce4 and firefox at the moment, just to show you guys, that my installation is working to some point, but after a few minutes, or sometimes even after a few hours, I get those segmentaton faults.

Anyway, the fact that I was able to pull a Stage1 installation off without any problems, and the fact that all the BSD's I tried were humming along quite nicely, I am convinced that something seems to be wrong with my kernel. I'm posting all the revelant config files, so if maybe some kind soul with some Alpha expereince could help me out here, that would really rock

/proc/cpuinfo

jeffd · n00b Joined: 22 Apr 2004 Posts: 22 Location: Mass

Just curious - what was your motivation for replacing the TGA2 card with the Matrox card? I'm not sure if your problem is related or not. Jay Estabrook made working TGA2 drivers for XFree86 quite a few years ago already. I'm not sure if anyone has done anything to make them work with X.org or not. It is curious though that the BSD's worked ok and the only change was the graphics card. I seem to have some vague recollections from my NT on Alpha days that the Matrox Milleniums did have a couple of wierd quirks. If I can remember what they were, I will post back here.

Do your seg faults create any core files you can examine?

Jeff D

doalwa · Posted: Wed Mar 02, 2005 7:27 pm Post subject:

Thanks for your reply jeffd!

Well, I didn't have any choice as to replace the TGA card because i wasn't able to boot a single CD while the card was still in place..I tried to boot the installation CDs for OpenVMS, FreeBSD, Gentoo...they all hung upon detecting the Graphics Adapter..as soon as I swapped the card with a generic Matrox PCI Card I was able to install BSD and Gentoo without any trouble.

Anyway, I'll check if there are indeed any core files I could examine, didn't have that much time those last few days.

Thanks alot

_________________
Keepin' the Funk alive since 1983!

dbackeberg · n00b Joined: 15 Mar 2005 Posts: 25 Location: Boston

Two ideas:

1) some, if not most installation cds will let you run without X. Check out the boot options for the specific disk you want to use.
2) now that you're installed you can yank out that card and rely on the original card.

jeffd · n00b Joined: 22 Apr 2004 Posts: 22 Location: Mass

OpenVMS should have booted with a TGA2. Not sure why it didn't.

Kloeri · Retired Dev Joined: 02 Sep 2002 Posts: 144

Xorg doesn't currently support TGA2. TGA is supported but I don't know of any plans to add TGA2 support.