[vmips] Linux on VMIPS?

[Cable Guy]

Brian, first I want to say how impressed I am by this piece of work. 
Wonderful job.  I find it almost inconceivable that this list gets so
little traffic (I've scoured the mailing list archives looking for the
answers to a few things but there's so little there).  I have a few
questions I hope you have time to answer.

I'm trying to get a minimal Linux up and running on VMIPS.  I saw
where you said you had made progress in this area.  Care to share any
of the details?  I built a 2.4.18 kernel using the DECStation 5000/200
flavor, selected the DZ serial terminal and TurboChannel in the
configuration.  I'll deal with any problems there as I come across
them but right now I'm having a huge problem just getting the ROM
built and the setup code to run.  I'm experiencing the dreaded "Huge
ROM image" problem.  I've read your post about this at
http://www.dgate.org/pipermail/vmips/2004-June/000096.html, and I've
read the manual.  I'm pretty sure I accounted for all the sections in
the linker script but my ROM output file is over 1 GB in size.  I have
my Linux kernel et al at 0x80000000 and the startup code at
0xBFC00000.  The LMAs show up there too.  Given that the startup code
must always be at 0xBFC0000 how in the world is it ever going to be
possible to get a reasonable size ROM image?

Is it necessary to load everything including my vmlinux kernel above
the 0xBFC00000 line and then move/copy it to lower memory where I can
use it?  Note that I am using an uncompressed kernel at the moment. 
I'll worry about compressed kernel images later.  Right now my tiny
vmlinux kernel is less than 1 MB and using an uncompressed kernel is
one less thing to worry about until I make some progress.

Can you post your ld.whatever script for Linux?  How about a sample
setup.S assembler sample to kick everything off re. zeroing out the
.bss section, copying read/write data sections to RAM, etc.?  Any help
at all would be greatly appreciated, and once again thanks for this
very nice program.

(P.S. My ultimate objective here is to get my own Linux kernel and
userspace programs running on a SOHO router I have that's using an
ADM5120 MIPS 4kc SOC.  I've found good stuff on the net re. similar
devices using Broadcom chipsets, but they're big-endian and the
ADM5120 is little-endian.  At least all the firmware upgrades released
for it so far are little-endian.  I re-build VMIPS for
mipsel-tradlittlemips and the sample programs run fine so I don't
think that will be a huge problem.  I want to simulate the Linux
running on this router and a subset of the router's hardware using
VMIPS.  I don't need the IP networking to be actually functional in
VMIPS.  I just need it to simulate the booting of Linux cold from
Flash ROM and then play around until I understand how firmware
upgrades are done.)