Ok, I figured it out. I noticed that the 4.11 kernel has a more "generous" memory layout than the 4.9 one:
kernel 4.9: [ 0.000000] Memory: 504492K/524288K available (3777K kernel code, 371K rwdata, 1128K rodata, 296K init, 247K bss, 19796K reserved, 0K cma-reserved, 0K highmem) kernel 4.11: [ 0.000000] Memory: 502648K/524288K available (4096K kernel code, 398K rwdata, 1132K rodata, 1024K init, 248K bss, 21640K reserved, 0K cma-reserved, 0K highmem) So I suspected that the 4.11 kernel might be overwriting/corrupting the initrd.img provided in memory before it gets to unpack it, and changed the memory location from 0xa00000 to 0xc00000: Marvell>> tftpboot 0x800000 C0A80802.img-4.11-bpo [...] Marvell>> cp.l 0xf8400000 0xc00000 0x240000 Marvell>> setenv bootargs earlycon console=ttyS0,115200 root=/dev/ram initrd=0xc00000,0x900000 ramdisk=34816 coherent_pool=1M Marvell>> bootm 0x800000 ## Booting image at 00800000 ... Image Name: kernel 4.11.0-0.bpo.1-marvell Created: 2017-07-30 23:17:11 UTC Image Type: ARM Linux Kernel Image (uncompressed) Data Size: 2076472 Bytes = 2 MB Load Address: 00008000 Entry Point: 00008000 Verifying Checksum ... OK OK Starting kernel ... Uncompressing Linux... done, booting the kernel. [ 0.000000] Booting Linux on physical CPU 0x0 [ 0.000000] Linux version 4.11.0-0.bpo.1-marvell (debian-ker...@lists.debian.org) (gcc version 6.3.0 20170516 (Debian 6.3.0-18) ) #1 Debian 4.11.6-1~bpo9+1 (2017-07-09) [...] [ 0.267272] Unpacking initramfs... [ 0.597766] Freeing initrd memory: 9216K [...] Welcome to Debian GNU/Linux 9 (stretch)! Voila! It's finally booting! So, was the 4.11 kernel compiled/linked with a wrong alignment padding setting? Or should the bootloader environment be changed to permanently use the higher address for passing initrd.img to the kernel?
