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Shane's new PMON

Read the README before doing ANYTHING!

Some frequently asked questions about this upgrade can be answered at Agendawiki.

The vmlinux binary must not be uncompressed prior to flashing. Use a standard SNOW romdisk with these. The flashing instructions are not what you are used to - read them carefully, and make sure you don't flash the kernel into the pmon space! Note: the 3.2.0 version in the README is wrong, see the actual boot screen below for what it really is.

Note: It's a good idea to have a working SNOW system before doing this. The procedure for restoring defaults is slightly different here, so you want to avoid having to do it at this point. Warning: You can't use a non-sdram kernel with this sdram PMON, and you can't use this sdram-kernel with a non-sdram PMON.

You'll need a new vrflash if you want to be able to "restore defaults" with this new kernel/pmon .

Warning: your browser will attempt to decompress the kernel. Don't let it. If you have trouble downloading these from here, try my ftp site instead.

You must use a compressed kernel with the new PMON, and you must use a kernel specifically built for this PMON (you can't just compress an old kernel and expect it to work). Note: If your vrflash utility complains about the kernel being gzipped, all you may need to do is rename it to not have the .gz suffix (don't actually uncompress it! Just rename it) to fool vrflash.

MD5s

e621e8e4d8cce3b9fda906d2e4d718b3  pmon.binary (194,920 bytes)
0f82b14d2f2f178e4bd39a901b07078f  vmlinux.binary.gz (697,964 bytes)

Boot screen

Note the date and message about uncompressing, those are the indicators that you're running the new PMON. 
PMON version 3.1.422 [NEC Vr41XX UEB,EL,FLASH]
VR4181 support by Bradley D. LaRonde <brad@ltc.com> Aug 30 2001 10:00:42
This is free software, and comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY,
you are welcome to redistribute it without restriction.
CPU type NEC VR4181
  Rev 5.2.  65.54 MHz/1.17 MHz.
Memory size   8 MB.
Icache size  16 KB, 16/line
Dcache size   8 KB, 16/line


Autoboot command: "g -e a00905e0 -- root=/dev/rom video=vr4181fb:xres:160,yres:240,bpp:4,"
Press any key to cancel.
 0
Uncompressing blocks... done.

Restoring Defaults

From an email that Shane wrote as we were testing the new pmon/kernel combo. The point to remember is that this is a compressed kernel, and needs to be uncompressed...

Shane wrote:

Cut the whole thing, but I just wanted to point something out that sort of answers a point where things got messed up. If you want to jump to the kernel by hand in the new PMON/Kernel pair, then what you need to do is: 

unzip
$linux

So if you wanted to restore defaults in the new scenario, what you would do is: 

unzip
$linux console=ttyS0,115200 init=/sbin/restore_defaults

Reverting

Here's the original PMON if you want to revert this change. The same warnings apply. You'll need to revert the kernel also, but any normally uncompressed kernel will do. 
b7eccb55a99fc823332f6be1e76f7f32  original-pmon-3.3.0.tar.gz (73,615 bytes)

Sources

9393305f30b93f490990da4d1d0ba644  pmon-vr-3.2.0.tar.gz (1.0M)
b9e3dcf1ae7455d77b053f03d1c44e04  pmon-vr-3.3.0.tar.gz (1.1M)

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