SGI O2

[flavio]

I've just installed gentoo on an 02.

The installation went flawlessly and it netboots fine mounting the local /dev/sda3 root device. However I can not get it to boot the kernel from the local hard drive. OTOH arcboot 3.8 doesn't link properly under gcc 3.4.1.

Did anybody managed to boot a kernel locally either using the SGI volume header or compiling arcboot with gcc 3.4.1?

I've searched in the forums and googled it and I don't see anything conclusive.

Thanks,

Flavio
_________________
Flavio Villanustre
flavio AT geminis dot dyndns dot org

[Kumba]

Unfortunately, booting off the harddrive is a no-go on the O2. There's an extremely obscure bug somewheres in the kernel that completely breaks this, and no one's ever invested the time to chase it down.

The preferable solution is to fix arcboot to be a better bootloader, and for a very brief time, I thought I had found a fix by changing the entry address of the kernel on O2 systems. What I later found out was happening, was the kernel was being loaded into non-cached memory on the O2 and arcboot would happily boot it. This caused bogomips to get reported incorrectly, and one can only wonder what other interesting things this broke.

The general theory in this case is arcboot isn't properly flushing the caches on O2 before trying to boot the kernel, and the resultant boom follows. So for now, O2's have to be netbooted. Maybe this'll get fixed in the future, but I'm not really sure.


--Kumba
_________________
"The past tempts us, the present confuses us, the future frightens us. And our lives slip away, moment by moment, lost in that vast, terrible in-between."
--Emperor Turhan, Centauri Republic

[flavio]

Netbooting is not too bad anyway...

What about booting from cdrom? Is it still not a viable solution in an O2?

Thanks,

Flavio
_________________
Flavio Villanustre
flavio AT geminis dot dyndns dot org