The collected works of rbhuang

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

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.

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!

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!