Re: Strange, strange occurence

["Niels Sterrenburg" <niels.sterrenburg@philips.com>]

Hi Steve,

When you set a breakpoint with the ice and step through,
for each step the ICE set's a breakpoint on the next instruction:
e.g.:
- modifies next instruction in memory (via CPU !!!)
  with a breakpoint instruction,
- and update the cache so that the breakpoint instruction is really in
memory and that i-cache is invalid.
(or something like that)

So indead you have a cache problem which is explanable solved/disapeared
by steppig through with the ICE.

Maybe a stupid question from me but why flushing an icache ?:
r4k_flush_icache_range

regards,

Niels

> Well I'm hoping it isn't so strange to some of you folks and you'll be
> able
> to tell what's going on :)
>
> Here's my problem:
>
> Using MontaVista Linux 3.1 on a Toshiba RBTx4938 board. Using YAMON, when
> I
> download the kernel via the debug ethernet port it runs fine. If I
> download
> the kernel via the Tx4938 inbuilt ethernet controller, it crashes!
>
> Memory checksumming and a quick manual memory dump inspection reveals that
> the kernel download went perfectly ok, and the image is completely and
> correctly downloaded to RAM.
>
> The crash is occuring inside the function r4k_flush_icache_range().
>
> I tried 'flush -i' and 'flush -d' on YAMON after the download but before
> the
> 'go', but that didn't help. I also tried completely disabling caches and
> loading/running uncached, but it gave the same error.
>
> Now, the final twist! Using an ICE, I set a breakpoint at the
> r4k_flush_icache_range function. Then I loaded the kernel as usual, ran it
> with the ICE, stepped through a few instructions inside the
> r4k_flush_icache_range function and then did a 'cont'. The kernel now
> booted
> fine!
>
> If I don't set the breakpoint inside that function though, and just try to
> run with the ICE the same
> error (Inst fetch/Load error) occurs.
>
> I'm at a loss trying to figure out what's going on. I suspect it has
> something to do with caches perhaps (duh!), but have no clue what!
> Anybody
> out there face a similar kind of a situation before?
>
> Thanks in advance for any help offered.
>
> Regards,
> -Steve
>
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