Miscellaneous Operating Systems/Hardware

Dear Dr. Larose,


Recently I just bought a SGI Altix 350, with 4 nodes and 8 cpu with 1.5 GB, and the cpu Sspec number is SL7FP. I just did what Dr. Stephane Larose told us in http://rad.bioinfo.ulaval.ca/hardware/sgi/altixia64 . But always got the message as: ...... "Freeing unused kernel memory: 448 KB freed....", and then hang.

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I also tried on SUSE-Linux Enterprise Server 10sp2 (freely downloadable 60 day trial version), and got the same message as above.

I have checked the system in EFI shell and found its PROM version is 3.40, and the SAL version was also 3.40. After I did a little search on the internet, and it suggested that maybe my PROM is too old to communicate with your ia64 netinst. Since this machine was bought using my own personal money, I could not afford to buy SGI Propack 5 or 6. I don't know if ant one could help me with the PROM file called snprom.bin with which I could update my PROM to at least 4.53 version? With the upgrade, I would like to try on Dr. Larose's trick again ( http://rad.bioinfo.ulaval.ca/hardware/sgi/altixia64 ).

Thank you for your time


Ribo HUANG

Are you connected to the system via a serial console? If so, you may need to manually set the baud rate in the "CONSOLE=" parameter. For example, if you have your console set at 38400 baud you would pass "CONSOLE=/dev/ttySG0,38400".

pierocks wrote: Are you connected to the system via a serial console? If so, you may need to manually set the baud rate in the "CONSOLE=" parameter. For example, if you have your console set at 38400 baud you would pass "CONSOLE=/dev/ttySG0,38400".

Thank you for input. Yes, I connected to the system via a serial console by issuing the commands:

#>cu -l ttyd2

(I used SGI Fuel as console)

and the console displays were all ok, main problem was that I could not boot and install either Debian CD by Dr. Stephane Larose or SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 sp2. This made my Altix 350 on use at present. please anyone help me with the snprom.bin in your SGI ProPack 5.0 or 6.0. Thank you!


rbhuang

By the way, more about the error message I got from the installation of Dr. Larose Debian CD:

.......
EFI Time Services Driver v0.4
Serial: 8250/16650 driver $Revision: 1.90 $ 4 ports, IRQ sharing enabled
sn_console: console driver init
ttySG0 at I/O 0x0 (irq=0) is SGI SN L1
RAMDISK driver initialized: 16 RAM disks of 32768k size 1024 blocksize
mice: PS2/2 mouse device common for all mice
TCP bic registered
NET: Registered protocol family 1
NET: Registered protocol family 17
Freeing unused kernel memory: 384KB freed

I saw a SGI engineer's posts in 2004 and he mentioned that a bug in Altix PROM caused boot failures:
http://www.gelato.unsw.edu.au/archives/ ... 10303.html

When I tried to boot from the first CD of SLES 9RC5 (60 days trial downloaded from Novell today), I had this message:

Uncompressing Linux ... done
Loading initrd initrd ... done
POD entered via OS requested halt, using Cac mode
0 000: POD SysCt Cac>

I really don't know what this will mean. Please give me some advice.

http://x86.sk/~toxygen/rbhuang/
hope that helps.

p.s.:
shub1snprom.bin is from sles 10 sp1 propack 5 sp3
4.07-snprom.bin is from sles 9 sp4 propack 4 sp4

sizes of both are same, but md5sum differs, no idea why.

Hi,

I think you need first install the SGI pro pack.
In fact the pro pack is a Linux pack...

I send you an answer by mail.

Julien

Dear big fan and Julien, thank you so much for your kind help. I am now away from my home town and will go back home in 23 Aug, I can then try your files.

By the way, I just freely downloaded SLES 9 sp3 from Novel wweb site, and it seems to me that this version of SUSE may be free to everyone as long as you register an account in Novel web site.

I will let you know the ourcoming of my Altix booting and software installation!

rbhuang wrote: By the way, I just freely downloaded SLES 9 sp3 from Novel wweb site, and it seems to me that this version of SUSE may be free to everyone as long as you register an account in Novel web site.

IIRC, SLES is free to try, but you need to buy an entitlement code to get certain features, like software updates through Yast, multi cpu support, etc.

josehill wrote: IIRC, SLES is free to try, but you need to buy an entitlement code to get certain features, like software updates through Yast, multi cpu support, etc.

I'm kind of confused. Thought I'd look at little Susie, the movie wasn't so hot but Novell sent me to OpenSuse 11 download, grabbed a live CD iso burned it and away we went, saw 4 processors big bubbles no troubles ... in fact, looks pretty nice. Between Red Hat and Novell, I kinda prefer Novell. At least Novell's enemy is Microsoft while Red Hat targets Unix.

I've personally tended towards SLES in my own commercial Linux work (i.e. stuff that's important enough to pay for Linux maintenance contracts), though RedHat is clearly more popular in the USA and with ISVs, which is why I tend to recommend CentOS to people looking for freebie "enterprisey" distros.

IBM is a big SLES supporter, too, so I think that it will stick around for a while. My biggest general knock on SLES is that it seems a little less finalized/unified in terms of configuration tools, gui, etc., but I've been happy with it. I haven't tried OpenSUSE yet.

rbhuang: did you succeed?

Dear Big Fan and others:

Sorry, so far there had been no luck for me. I downloaded the snprom.bin files from the site you gave me, and one big problem was that no matter what OS I used to burned the files into CD, my Altix 350 simply did not recognize the CD: I have tried Mac OS X, and Windows XP to burn the files into CD, but non of them worked. Please kindly tell me how should I burn these two files and the EFI Boot Manager could recognize the file sstem and then I could issue the commands like

>flash -a snprom.bin

to upgrade my PROM in Altix 350 main boards.

By the way, one of our friends in this BBS has sent me soem system disks, but he just copy 8 disks into one DVD without preparing the iso images, so I don't know if you could tell me a way to PREPARE boot disk from this DVD? Is it possible?

Thank you all!

Sorry, it should be "Dear toxygen and others"...

Thank you for help, toxygen!

I'm having the same problems, albeit years later, and the links above are dead. SLES10 CD1 boots but hangs at "freeing kernel memory" even when I supply console=ttySG0

Help!

aperezbios wrote: I'm having the same problems, albeit years later, and the links above are dead. SLES10 CD1 boots but hangs at "freeing kernel memory" even when I supply console=ttySG0

Help!

I already wrote to toxygen concerning the PROM files. He doesn't have them at hand but he will look for them as soon as time allows...
The files are on Supportfolio, but only downloadable with full access. One chance will be that somebody with full access downloads them
for us or I succeed to find them elsewhere...
I let you know when I something turns up.

btw, have you tried SLES9 ?
After free registration the CD images are downloadable from the Novell website.

Voralyan wrote: The files are on Supportfolio, but only downloadable with full access.

btw, have you tried SLES9 ?
After free registration the CD images are downloadable from the Novell website.

Yes, I downloaded SLES9, although it's important to note that you must download and use SLES9-RC5 (this was what became the final release, SP0 if you will), from Novell, if you want to install Linux on an Altix which has the old defective PROM/firmware.

As of this writing, you can still download them from http://download.novell.com/Download?buildid=WEhUK-nOYF0~ (free registration required)

Some notes for installing debian IA64 on the Altix 350:

1. Forget to do the install with the 6.X.X CD/DVD's. The major problem is that it doesn't contain the firmware for
the QLA12160 anymore so you won't be able to write to any HDDs. The installer detects the QLA correctly and comes
up with a dialog to load the missing firmware from "removable media". Of course "removable media" contains "USB sticks" and
"floppies" as quoted by the installer. And it means exactly that: No optical media here. Sorry...

Out of curiosity I plugged a PCI USB card in the first node, second PCI bus of the machine. It had a VIA chipset. So no high
expectations here. Of course it didn't work at all. No surprise I thought...

I wasn't in the mood to fumble the firmware files into the inst media, so I tried the 5.0.8 "lenny" media set.

To do a basic install you need the first CD of the full CD set. The "netinst" CD won't work (YMMV).
It can be booted as is, no need to specify a special console device.

Running the debian installer it fails to detect the CD-ROM after configuring your keyboard layout. That is because it
doesn't load the "sgiioc4" module by default. So select "Go back" in the current installer window and select "Run a shell" in
the appearing menu. At the shell do "modprobe sgiioc4" and it loads the module and all the depending modules. You should see
that the CD-ROM is detected. Exit the shell. Now you can continue the install as usual.

After the system is installed and booted you should add "sgiioc4" to "/etc/modules".

As long as you are at the serial console be sure to do editing work in an editor that doesn't rely on "CTRL+..." keystrokes
as some of these are caught up by the L1 what can be very disturbing.

When you are about to upgrade to 6.X.X after the successful install be aware that the firmware issue arises again when
you install the new kernel. To stay on the safe side you can only upgrade the userland and stay with the old kernel.
I'm currently happy with lenny and will do the upgrade when I'm in a adventurous mood

As I said YMMV with the install ( it seems the it comes with integrated witty mood by default)...

What if you dist-upgrade to the current stable release from the running system rather than the CD-ROM?
Just make sure you install the QLogic firmware package before you reboot into the new system.

jan-jaap wrote: What if you dist-upgrade to the current stable release from the running system rather than the CD-ROM?
Just make sure you install the QLogic firmware package before you reboot into the new system.

Should work I think. I will try it tomorrow...