Description of Problem: I got recently a UP1500 Alpha (Nautilus) board and tried to install on it Red Hat 7.1 distribution plus updates. The problem is that 2.4.9-12 current kernel fails to boot. The machine hangs somewhere in a startup process, both when attempting to boot multiuser and single, and normally while accessing disks (turning on swap, attempting to mount filesystems or in the middle of fsck if filesystem were dirty). Lockups in fsck are anywhere after 25% to 60% of the whole thing done. This is what 'cat /proc/cpuinfo' has to say: cpu : Alpha cpu model : SimulateLCA4 cpu variation : 7 cpu revision : 0 cpu serial number : system type : Nautilus system variation : 0 system revision : 0 system serial number : cycle frequency [Hz] : 800000000 timer frequency [Hz] : 1024.00 page size [bytes] : 8192 phys. address bits : 44 max. addr. space # : 255 BogoMIPS : 1586.36 kernel unaligned acc : 12 (pc=fffffc00008163e8,va=fffffc0000ad9e6c) user unaligned acc : 24 (pc=120000794,va=120099576) platform string : UP1500 800 MHz cpus detected : 1 There is 1 GB of a physical memory on board and one SCSI disk SEAGATE Model ST336737LW attached to sym53c1010 controller. Here is a list of various kernels which were tried on this machnine and results: 2.2.20 plus various patches - boots 2.4.2-010920 patched by a machine maker - boots 2.4.3-12 from original RH 7.1 - boots 2.4.5-ac13 - boots 2.4.7-10 (updates to RH 7.1) - hangs in startup 2.4.9-12 (current updates to RH 7.1) - hangs in startup 2.4.9-12custom (reconfigured and recompiled from kernel-source-2.4.9-12.alpha.rpm) - fails to start to load 2.4.13-ac8 - boots Some other kernels with versions higher than 2.4.13-ac8 which I tried, in particular 2.4.17-rc1, just do not even start to load. Nothing past messages from a boot loader shows up on a screen and a machine can be recovered only with a power switch. In case you suspect SCSI driver the same version 1.7.3c-20010512 is used by at least 2.4.5-ac13, which boots, and 2.4.9-12. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): kernel-2.4.9-12
Further developments: I did recompile using the same tools ("clean" RH 7.1 with all current updates) 2.4.16, 2.4.17rc1 and 2.4.17rc2 on UP1100 and these binaries boot and so far seem to work fine on that UP1100. So some of problems listed above can be caused by hardware faults in UP1500. But 2.4.9-12 with Red Hat supplied binaries failed to boot UP1500. I did manage to boot with it UP1100 but system did not behave; I got in a short order some "machine checks", which do not happen with other kernels, and truly weird looking oopses. So there could be two separate problems there (or an attack of "cosmic rays").
Alpha is no longer a supported platform