Gentoo on an HP Apollo 7100/715

agaffney · Posted: Thu Jun 03, 2004 11:18 pm Post subject: Gentoo on an HP Apollo 7100/715

I have a HP Apollo 7100/715 computer w/ 256MB RAM, 4GB SCSI HD, and SCSI CD-ROM. I booted from the Gentoo HPPA LiveCD without a problem. I can repartition the drive (previously had HPUX) without a problem. When I try to format any of the partitions (mke2fs -j /dev/sda3), mke2fs hangs and can't be killed with 'kill -9'.

Also, it sometimes hangs at the "getting time from hardware clock" stage of the LiveCD bootup. Am I doing something wrong or this box slowly dying?

goldwing · n00b Joined: 03 Jun 2004 Posts: 3

your filesystem should be of type f0 (Linux/PA-RISC boot)

agaffney · Posted: Sun Jun 06, 2004 5:23 pm Post subject:

The boot partition should be type F0, but the other partitions should be the normal 82 and 83.

squawker · Posted: Tue Jun 15, 2004 6:54 pm Post subject:

Do you know which kernel version is on the live cd you're using? This sounds a lot like the ccio-dma/scatter-gather problem that people have been seeing on Raven (C110, C180 and others) boxes from approx. 2.6.3 and onwards. They seem fine until they lock solid under maintained disk i/o.

Not sure exactly which model of 715 you have there. Must be one of:

715/33 \
715/50 |- "scorpio"s with PA7100 cpu and ncr53c700 SCSI
715/75 /

715/64 \
715/80 |- "mirage"s with PA7100LC cpu and ncr53c710 SCSI
715/100 |
715/100XC /

Are your SCSI devices on the built-in SCSI bus (driven by lasi700 driver) or on an add in card?

-Andy

agaffney · Posted: Tue Jun 15, 2004 7:05 pm Post subject:

I don't have the LiveCD in front of me, but it was the one used on the 200404xx HPPA LiveCD. The one on the 2004051x HPPA LiveCD also did the same thing. Although, it only does it with a 4GB SCSI drive. A 2GB SCSI drive we stuck in the machine worked just fine. The drive is connected through the internal SCSI bus.

squawker · Posted: Tue Jun 15, 2004 7:20 pm Post subject:

Okay - I think I'm probably barking up the wrong tree then. The internal 8bit SCSI chips (ncr53c700/ncr53c710) that are built into the LASI asic are driven by the lasi700 driver and that doesn't even attempt to do scatter-gather as far as I can remember.

-Andy

agaffney · Posted: Tue Jun 15, 2004 7:41 pm Post subject:

One of the devs on the gentoo-hppa list said it might be a problem with the tag queue in the kernel. He said it should have been fixed in the newer LiveCD I tried, though. I have no idea what the "tag queue" is.