low mem SGI systems

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sparklesdan · Post by **sparklesdan** » Wed Jan 07, 2004 2:50 am

I'm currently half way through a (so far) successful stage 1 install on an r4600 indy with 40 meg of RAM running at 133mhz.

I found I wasn't able to boot from the gentoo boot images (I'm assuming this was my low memory causing problems) and had to go back and use the debian netboot images, which worked really rather well. Mind you it's taking a long time. Bootstrapping took about 60 hours, and emerge system is currently running at about 12 hours (compiling at an average of roughly 1 package an hour).

I'm hoping to get X running sometime early next week....

Kumba · Post by **Kumba** » Thu Jan 08, 2004 1:18 am

I'm surprised you made it past bootstrap on 40MB of ram. Have you searched eBay for more ram? I usually see ~128MB go for about $30 + s&h, which isn't too bad.

Also, what bootimage did you use (ip22-r4k-20031230.img is the latest I've made)?, and what error did it give (if any)?

--Kumba

sparklesdan · Post by **sparklesdan** » Thu Jan 08, 2004 2:56 am

Kumba wrote:I'm surprised you made it past bootstrap on 40MB of ram. Have you searched eBay for more ram? I usually see ~128MB go for about $30 + s&h, which isn't too bad.

actually at first I couldn't get it to bootstrap, but then I remembered to activate my 100mb swap partition :)

I'm intending to pick up some more ram sometime soon, as well as a bigger hdd (I only have 1gig atm, so as soon as I get a little further with the install I'm going to have to start nfs mounting large parts of the filesystem) and a 24 bit graphics board. But it's all going to have to wait until I have a bit more cash lying around. For now I'm just happy to have it doing something other than sitting in the corner collecting dust!

Also, what bootimage did you use (ip22-r4k-20031230.img is the latest I've made)?, and what error did it give (if any)?

It was a few weeks ago now that I booted the system so I'm afraid I can't remember what the error message was (or even if there was one), or exactly what image I used. I still have the file on my tftp server, but it's just titled gentoo-r4k.img, which may or may not be helpful. I think I just used the image linked from the current mips install docs.

If it's any help then when this install is finished I'll try netbooting that image again to see if I get any error messages.

sparklesdan · Post by **sparklesdan** » Fri Jan 09, 2004 1:52 am

hmm, well I managed to completely build the system and everything seemed to go quite well. But whenever I try and boot the system it hangs fairly majorly at the sgiseeq.c line. It's doing this with both the elf and ecoff kernels.

At this point the only thing I seem to be able to do to reboot the system is to pull the power cable out the back! Which I really don't like doing.

Any ideas as to what could be causing this? And what I could do to fix it...

decker in flux · Post by **decker in flux** » Thu May 06, 2004 12:22 pm

Have you made any progress?

-d

Redhatter · Post by **Redhatter** » Thu May 06, 2004 9:53 pm

I've had this issue too... Linux 2.4.24 downloaded from Linux-MIPS CVS just hangs. Apparently it's an issue with the code for the R4600 series of CPUs, but I'm not sure.

In my case, the kernel seemed to like mucking with the PROM, wiping out my ethernet MAC address. (I had to reprogramme it with a bunch of 'fill' commands -- there's a NetBSD FAQ on this).

I haven't made any further progress as yet. If someone knows a fix, please, do share it with us!