another hypersparc smp question ...

[Heitzso <heitzso@growthmodels.com>]

I've gone to the 'these kernels work' page and
it would appear that a 2.4.23-pre5 would work in
SMP mode on my dual ROSS Hypersparcs ss20, but it
still goes out to lunch during the boot up
sequence.  (512M RAM)

I've gotten my vmlinux size down to 2,365,108
but am not sure that I'm not running out of
memory.  Anyone know what the limit is?  And
I'm wondering how can off loading builtins to modules
help if the modules have to be loaded into memory
at the same time anyway.  Don't modules
count towards the memory limit block?

I noticed a reference to stripping the
kernel.  Is this necessary? Useful? And if so,
what's the command so I can man on it and learn
how to use it.

Should I be falling back to an old 2.2.X series
kernel for sparc32 hypersparc SMP?  I'm wanting to
leverage the nice extras iptables provides, but
will fall back to earlier flavor if have to.

I'm also wondering if I am hanging on a console/ttyS0
cross up.  Right now I'm recompiling without prom console
and without framebuffer support.  I've also sym linked
/dev/console over to /dev/ttyS0 and am _not_ using
devfs.  I'm running headless over ttya.

I've put in over two days at the moment on trying
to set this box up (was running Solaris fine but
I wanted to run Linux which I'm more familiar with,
particularly to rig up firewall, proxies, etc.)
and am wondering if I'm just crashing into a
dead end trying to setup SMP on this box.

Any pointers would be appreciated.  I've googled
on most word combos but am not seeing recent
references to the hypersparc/smp combo.


Thanks!
Heitzso