IA-64: Kernel panic: Attempted to kill init!

[__spy]

Hello.

I have an old machine based on dual first Itanium's (Merced), a prototype for HP i2000, and likely related to the "Tiger" reference design (that's it: http://ishells.net/spy/itanium/).

I try to use a minimal LiveCD, ELILO runs fine, the kernel unpacks and starts probing my hardware, but soon goes panic: "Kernel panic - not syncing: Attempted to kill init!". The call stack trace is printed, and among other functions, it contains an ia64_illegal_op_fault() call, which gives me an idea of some failed compatibility trap. However, I expected (according to what I read) Itanium2 binaries to be backward-compatible with Merced. Is this really a binary compatibility problem I'm facing?

Does anyone have ideas how to work around this problem? Any help will be greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance.

[eccerr0r]

Could you hook up a serial console and dump the entire boot sequence, would be interesting to see exactly what function ended up calling the bad instruction, and whether or not it really is a bad instruction or quite possibly bad hardware...

(don't copy the error by hand )

(Oh, and as far as I know, the Tiger reference design isn't a Itanium/Merced design, it's for Itanium2s)
_________________
Intel Core i7 2700K/Radeon R7 250/24GB DDR3/256GB SSD
What am I supposed watching?