Need advice getting gentoo on ia64 to run

mzwk · n00b Joined: 27 Feb 2015 Posts: 15

Hi there.

Since weeks im trying to get a linux on my sgi prism deskside, which failed so far, and this drives me totally insane. Im near the point where im getting a mental disorder about this.

The newer kernels seem to not work right - All above kernel 2.6 take ages to boot, endless error messages and nothing works.
gentoo (current release) boots after around 15 minutes to the livecd prompt. I am then able to enter commands, but they take around 30 secs to get executed. I dropped that trying to get it running.
gentoo 2008: boots nicely, but it doesnt have the module for my hd controller (sgiioc4). Im also struggling with the old 2008 portage which doesnt quite work. I cant even "eselect profle" because theres no eselect on it, and i cant emerge, because the portage is too old.
Trying to "emerge -u system" fails because too old. "emerge -u portage" fails at some point where it cant find some python eselect file on the net. I searched the file on the net but wasnt able to find it.

So i tried mixing gentoo 2008 minimal install cd with current portage, but that doesnt work either. I dont know the exact errors now.

Also i have the problem to get a base 2008 system to work, without emerging and eselecting and whatnot. It doesnt load the required sgiioc4 module at boot (which is the hdd controller), and trying to modprobe sgiioc4 says it doesnt find the module. What is strange about this is that the cdrom is there, and that also hangs on the sgiioc4 controller. lsmod doesnt show sgiioc4.
So without hd i cant even install a base system from which i could go on.

I cant imagine a strategy on how to get this running.

I thought about a base 2008 install with current portage. That means an old kernel (2.6.x) with the current system. Does this work?

Another thing i tried because of the missing hd controller and therefore missing hdds, is to create a basic install on a usb stick (usb is working, lol), chroot into that and build kernel. But that also fails because of the not able to update portage.

So what can i do? Im too stupid to find a minimal install cd of the releases in between 2008 and the current version. Isnt there something for 10.0 12.0 and so on?

chithanh · Posted: Mon Mar 09, 2015 1:23 pm Post subject:

You don't need to use a Gentoo LiveCD to install Gentoo. Any booting Linux which can access the hard disk should be enough. The live media have nothing to do with the install that ends on your disk.

If you want to test various kernel versions, it is probably a good idea to cross compile the kernels and put them in the EFI system partition on your USB drive. Then use rEFInd or similar to boot them.

Do not try to mix the 2008.0 stages with current portage tree snapshots. It will not work. Get one of the recent autobuilds and start from there.

mzwk · n00b Joined: 27 Feb 2015 Posts: 15

Ok, the 2008 gentoo cd is the only one to boot in any way with acceptable performance, but its missing the HD controller.

What i want to know is how i can get 2008 to work in any way, so that the portage stuff can "bootstrap" itself so that im able to use emerge.

What also is needed to know is, if i can mix an old 2.6.x kernel with the current portage/gentoo/dontknowhowtosay?

My plan would be to boot 2008, install it on an external usb drive/thumbdrive, chroot in there, build kernel with the needed sgiioc4 module, and then reboot using the usb drive as internal drive to boot from that and go on.

But how do i install 2008 without being able to eselect profle xxx?

Also how can i get the needed kernel sources for building the old kernel?

Do i need to get an old portage snapshot from the archive (i found a site with the portage archive dating to around 2008) and work with that? I think i should not do an emerge --sync with that?

This all confuses me so much, because i dont know what to mix with what.

chithanh · Posted: Mon Mar 09, 2015 1:40 pm Post subject:

2008.0 is only a live image. It has nothing to do with what ends up in your install.

When you install Gentoo to your USB, do not use the 2008.0 stage3. Use a recent stage3 and portage snapshot. Then you can use the same kernel version that is in 2008.0 (you may see problems with udev, in that case use eudev or static /dev) and adjust its config to include the necessary driver.

mzwk · n00b Joined: 27 Feb 2015 Posts: 15

Ok... I did that also, but something didnt work. Anyway, i try again later and try to remember what happens ^^

Another thing with that approach: If i got the current portage, what happens if i emerge gentoo-sources? This installs the current kernel sources i guess. How can i emerge older kernels? Or is it a completely different approach?

[E] Ok, i bootet 2008 again, and theres something strange:
On boot it says it loads sgiioc4, then finds my cdrom (which is connected to the ioc4) containing the minimal live cd.
But theres nothing about the attached SATA disk.
I think the module is loaded, lsmod altough says it isnt so.
But my cdrom is there, my hd not.

If i say modprobe ioc4 or modprobe sgiioc4, it says module not found.

chithanh · Posted: Mon Mar 09, 2015 4:53 pm Post subject:

The gentoo-sources package provides no kernels older than 3.2. You may need to download directly from kernel.org if you need something older.

One thing I am not sure of is whether the sgiioc4 driver can support SATA disks. You may want to try with an IDE disk too. (or provide your lspci output in case there is a separate SATA controller present)

Edit: Some googling reveals that a vsc7174 may be driving your SATA ports. In that case your kernel needs to have CONFIG_SATA_VITESSE enabled.

mzwk · n00b Joined: 27 Feb 2015 Posts: 15

That module is loaded, but no hdd...

chithanh · Posted: Tue Mar 10, 2015 3:28 pm Post subject:

So what does dmesg say?

mzwk · n00b Joined: 27 Feb 2015 Posts: 15

Nothing that says something about the internal hd.

Well im beyond that. I built a kernel with the needed modules, but i cant get it to run.
elilo --efiboot fails at some point. I straced it, and it just freezes at some "wait( -1, " (I understand that this output is not helpfull).

So i cant get elilo to run on the hd and therefore cant boot.

I dont know how to fix this.

chithanh · Posted: Tue Mar 10, 2015 5:59 pm Post subject:

The sata driver usually enumerates all ports.

Making something boot on EFI is usually as simple as copying the correctly named files into the correct location on your EFI system partition. In your case this would be efi/boot/bootia64.efi

Also if your computer does not boot from local drives, try booting via PXE.

mzwk · n00b Joined: 27 Feb 2015 Posts: 15

Well it seems not so simple by just copying the kernel (vmlinuz, vmlinux.gz) to /boot...

The built in EFI boot manager doesnt see the files in the boot partition, so i cant select them (the kernel) to boot. The partition is vfat, so that shouldnt be the matter.

The file you mentioned (bootia64.efi) - Where do i get that? And why do you mention /efi/boot? My boot partition is just /boot without efi. Is that a reason for not working?

chithanh · Posted: Wed Mar 11, 2015 10:13 am Post subject:

To boot, EFI looks for an EFI system partition (Type EF on MBR, EF00 on GPT) which has a FAT32 filesystem.

It will then by default look for an EFI executable called efi/boot/bootia64.efi (bootx64.efi on amd64 systems). efibootmgr can create additional boot entries for you, which will boot differently named files.

bootia64.efi can be any EFI executable, usually it is from your boot loader. In your case, /usr/lib/elilo/elilo.efi is probably what you need.

mzwk · n00b Joined: 27 Feb 2015 Posts: 15

Ok i did that but i get an error "pointer is outside of image" trying to boot the elilo.efi file

chithanh · Posted: Thu Mar 12, 2015 12:22 am Post subject:

Apparently something went wrong during elilo compilation then. Find a precompiled elilo.efi and use that.

mzwk · n00b Joined: 27 Feb 2015 Posts: 15

Ok i did that, which also could jump a few steps forward, but fails with:

relocation is disabled, cannot load kernel

Something like that. I tried booting with -r which also failed

mzwk · n00b Joined: 27 Feb 2015 Posts: 15

fyi: My problem was i used netapp disks to install the OS on.
The netapp disks are formatted to 520 Bytes per default, and it seems this breaks things up on IA64.

Im now experimenting with several OSes on the machine.

[E]

I gave it another shot and tried the current kernel. It whines at boot that the kernel is compiled w/o "kernel relocation", and refuses to boot.

I looked hard, but didnt find anything about kernel relocation in make menuconfig.

How do i enable it?

mzwk · n00b Joined: 27 Feb 2015 Posts: 15

Ah i remember i made this thread.

I got updates, because i recently got it to run.

The relocate thing has to go into the elilo.conf.

Somehow i managed to get a 3.4.49 kernel to run on it (I also experimented with other versions, 2.6, 3.9.18 and 4.14). Now i have a updated current system running.

Though i have issues with all the kernels >3.4.49 (Besides 3.9.18 i didn't try other 3.x kernels yet).

3.9.x has a really strange behaviour (No major options were changed in the config):
It boots good and comes to the login prompt.
I can login and type things, but i get random freezes that also affect ssh sessions.
The symptom is that the cursor suddenly stops blinking on the connected monitor. When that happens the ssh session freezes excatly so long until i press a button on the attached keyboard to the machine. Then suddenly all inputs i made in the ssh session are visible and executed. Then it runs good for ten seconds, and the same thing happens again.

Very strange, can anybody help with this issue?