trying to make a long story short, was handed an aging powerpc MPC8360e system on which to place linux, along with a BSP that does in fact generate a bootable kernel and filesystem. however, according to this online page (and i am *not* in any way a powerpc expert): http://cache.freescale.com/files/netcomm/doc/fact_sheet/MPC8360EFS.pdf this processor has something called a "local bus", off of which on this board hang things like DSP, FPGA and other things. during boot, i can see absolutely no mention of any of the devices attached to this local bus, or even that the bus itself is recognized, then i noticed that the .config file used to build this 3.14.29 kernel does not select what looks like the appropriate kernel option FSL_LBC. if anyone out there is a powerpc expert, can you confirm that you need to select that option (and hence compile in the source file arch/powerpc/sysdev/fsl_lbc.c) to get that support? i'm puzzled only because, if that file is required for local bus support, the people who gave us the BSP really should have turned it on. thanks for any guidance. rday -- ======================================================================== Robert P. J. Day Ottawa, Ontario, CANADA http://crashcourse.ca Twitter: http://twitter.com/rpjday LinkedIn: http://ca.linkedin.com/in/rpjday ========================================================================