Cannot start the Linux kernel

Question

I have an sumsung arndale octa broad(featured with exynos 5420) and installed the linaro ubuntu server edition, now I want to run a custom compiled kernel. Firstly, I download the LSK kernel(version 3.14.10) form http://releases.linaro.org/14.05/components/kernel/linux-linaro-stable-lsk/, then I configured the kernel to support exynos 5420 (use exynos_defconfig) and run make uImage to compile the kernel. It seems that everything is ok and no error reported when compiling the kernel, but after I copy the uImage to the BOOT partition in my SD card and insert it to the board, the kernel cannot startup correctly. I use minicom to communicate with the board, when staring the new kernel, it print 'Starting kernel...', after that no other message output. I have tried many times with different kernel configuration, including turn on the kernel debug options, but the kernel still cannot startup and only print 'Staring kernel...'. Can you help me to slove this problem? Thank you very much.

Answer 1

The only kernel source that works on Exynos 5420 is in git branch linux-linaro-tracking.

git clone git://git.linaro.org/kernel/linux-linaro-tracking.git
​git checkout linux-linaro-tracking

Build it with

make olddefconfig
make ARCH=arm -j4 LOADADDR=0x20008000 uImage
​make ARCH=arm -j4 dtbs

Copy new kernel to SD (which is normally detected as mmcblk0 if you don't use on-board eMMC) with

mount /dev/mmcblk0p2 /mnt
​cp arch/arm/boot/uImage /mnt/uImage
​cp arch/arm/boot/dts/exynos5420-arndale-octa.dtb /mnt/board.dtb

Then reboot.