status of gentoo on SB150, Netra X1, and Netra T1

Message

GenTimJS · Post by **GenTimJS** » Tue Feb 01, 2005 7:26 pm

Anyone had success/failures with gentoo on the sun blade 150?

what about the netra X1, and netra T1 ?

I'm looking to setup some sparc systems at work to run gentoo, but I'd like know if anyone has had any experience with gentoo on any of these before I buy one on the company card ...

squash · Post by **squash** » Wed Feb 02, 2005 11:47 pm

I run several T1 systems (some T1 105, some T1 AC200). The AC200 is a little faster. No problems, just keep in mind that busmastered ethernet iterfaces come up in a different order than they are labelled.

trepid · Post by **trepid** » Tue Feb 22, 2005 2:58 am

I've actually gotten gentoo to work on a handful of Sunblade 150's using 2.4.x The problems i ran into was the cd freezing on boot up. Though, ide=nodma seemed to fix it. That was about the only problem i ran into, though i never did configure the sound to work. It was pretty experimental on my end, being just for a professor at my school.

HackingM2 · Post by **HackingM2** » Tue Mar 01, 2005 6:12 pm

I have a working (netbooting - diskless) Netra X1. It took a while to get it working but I have a 2.6.10 kernel running. I'm still using devfs though, I'm not brave enough to try moving to udev.

tiroy · Post by **tiroy** » Fri May 06, 2005 1:58 pm

Well I have a problem with rebooting. I have installed gentoo on the IDE (second master) disk (the first master is Solaris disk, the first slave - cd rom drive) with silo configured until this point:

http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/handbook/2 ... =1&chap=10

After reboot I have a panic:

VFS: Cannot open root device "hdc1" or 16:01
Please append the correct "root=" boot option
Kernel panic: VFS: unable to mount root fs on 16:01

fstab looks almost like in the example below:

http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/handbook/2 ... t=1&chap=8

/dev/hdc1 /boot ext2 defaults,noatime 1 2
/dev/hdc2 none swap sw 0 0
/dev/hdc3 / ext3 noatime 0 1

none /proc proc defaults 0 0
none /dev/shm tmpfs nodev,nosuid,noexec 0 0

/dev/cdroms/cdrom0 /mnt/cdrom auto noauto,user 0 0

silo.conf contains:

partition = 1 # Boot partition (= root partition)
root = /dev/hdc1 # Root partition
timeout = 150 # Wait 15 seconds before booting the default section

image = /boot/kernel-2.4.30
label = linux

hdc partitions:

Disk /dev/hdc (Sun disk label): 64 heads, 32 sectors, 8635 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 2048 * 512 bytes

Device Flag Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/hdc1 0 488 499712 83 Linux native
/dev/hdc2 488 976 499712 82 Linux swap
/dev/hdc3 0 8635 8842240 5 Whole disk
/dev/hdc4 976 1953 1000448 83 Linux native
/dev/hdc5 1953 2144 195584 83 Linux native
/dev/hdc6 2144 8635 6646784 83 Linux native

I thought that ext3 should not be chosen for the root partition, but repeating instalation form the point where I have crated root filesystem did not help.
I also have noticed that solaris primary disk has swap partition in the beggining (blocks 0-257) on the partition hda2, while hda1 starts on block 257. Is it a way that SB 150 IDE disks should be configured?
Please help

tiroy

GenTimJS · Post by **GenTimJS** » Sun May 08, 2005 10:43 pm

dualbooting on sparc kinda sucks...

id suggest installing gentoo on hdc
then install solaris on hda
then use the OBP command "boot disk X" as your method of dual booting ... primative, but functional. I use this method on an Ultra5 without any problems.

tiroy · Post by **tiroy** » Mon May 09, 2005 7:49 am

Dualbooting on sparc kinda sucks? So it is unsupported or what? Jeezzz...

I already have installed solaris on primary master, so I will not reinstall it. I wonder if simple swapping disks would help? This will require editing fstab on gentoo of course, probably something on solaris should be done too.
What do you think?

GenTimJS · Post by **GenTimJS** » Mon May 09, 2005 9:24 am

well dual booting isnt "unsupported" but none of the "official" sources of support (ie: sun) will provide you an easy way to do it.. the method i suggested was in turn suggested to me by sunsolve :-/

tiroy · Post by **tiroy** » Mon May 09, 2005 9:37 am

If sunsolve tell so, then ok :/ I will try to do some magic by swapping the disks.

GenTimJS · Post by **GenTimJS** » Mon May 09, 2005 12:43 pm

if you have 2 disks in, you can use the OBP command "boot" to boot the disk explicitly on startup

tiroy · Post by **tiroy** » Mon May 09, 2005 1:10 pm

I know, I tried it. Anyway I first had to boot from CD, run fdisk on gentoo disk, do nothing more than write the state of current configuration as advised here http://www.ultralinux.org/faq.html#q_5_31
Anyway I again have the same problem with booting:

VFS: Cannot open root device "hda1" or 03:01
Please append the correct "root=" boot option
Kernel panic: VFS: unable to mount root fs on 03:01

I wonder if I should start instalation from scratch with disk on the primary master channel.

riposte · Post by **riposte** » Tue May 10, 2005 8:29 am

tiroy - it looks like you have a separate /boot and / partition so your silo.conf as it stands may be incorrect.
I think it shoud be: root = /dev/hdc3 # Root partition .
Changing this should fix the problem.

tiroy · Post by **tiroy** » Tue May 10, 2005 9:49 am

Yeah I have noticed this oddity. Looks like I just followed the manual to carefully. One time they write nothing about creation a separate boot partition ( http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/handbook/2 ... t=1&chap=4 ), but later it is included in fstab and the rest of partitions created previously is not included there ( http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/handbook/2 ... t=1&chap=8 ). Is it enough to report this problem to manual authors?
Anyway I do not have a seperate boot partinion. And I also tried to set root=/dev/hdc3 without any success. Hint: on SUN machines slice 3 is reserved for whole disk, that's why I doubt it is correct setting for root.

riposte · Post by **riposte** » Tue May 10, 2005 10:49 am

and neither then should it be featuring in your fstab.
What is the actual partition/mount point setup you are using?

tiroy · Post by **tiroy** » Tue May 10, 2005 11:37 am

After I switched this disk to a primary master I modified fstab like this:

/dev/hda1 / ext2 defaults,noatime 1 2
/dev/hda2 none swap sw 0 0
/dev/hda4 /usr ext3 noatime 0 1
/dev/hda5 /var ext3 noatime 0 1
/dev/hda6 /home ext3 noatime 0 1

tiroy · Post by **tiroy** » Thu May 12, 2005 9:38 am

I finally have sucessfully booting gentoo from hdc. As advised by my colleague I configured 4,5 GB disk:

/dev/hdc1 0 122 124928 83 Linux native /boot ext2
/dev/hdc2 122 610 499712 82 Linux swap swap
/dev/hdc3 0 8635 8842240 5 Whole disk
/dev/hdc4 610 8635 8217600 83 Linux native / ext3

silo.conf:

root=/dev/hdc1
partition=1
default=gentoo
read-only
timeout=150
image=/kernel-2.4.30-sparc
label=gentoo
root=/dev/hdc4

Now I'll try to point hda with solaris in silo.conf to be able to boot it too.

oticon6 · Post by **oticon6** » Thu Mar 09, 2006 8:05 am

The boot/root thing is misleading. In mine:
partition=1
root=/dev/hda4

Boot partition is /dev/hda1
Root partition 's /dev/hda4

Apart from that, I finally have Gentoo running on my Netra X1 with the latest 2.6 kernel. I wouldn't recommend 2.4, I had endless troubles with it, and every time I solved a problem a new one would appear. 2.6 has been relatively smooth, and should work nicely once I get these last few glitches sorted out.

Nijinski · Post by **Nijinski** » Sat Mar 11, 2006 10:26 pm

oticon6 wrote: Apart from that, I finally have Gentoo running on my Netra X1 with the latest 2.6 kernel.

You wouldn't be able to post your kernel config and a note of the kernel sources you used would you please ?

I got round to rebooting my X1 today and discovered it didn't boot the 2.6 kernel properly.......

oticon6 · Post by **oticon6** » Sun Mar 12, 2006 12:23 pm

http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-414890.html

Already posted in that thread.

Nijinski · Post by **Nijinski** » Sun Mar 12, 2006 1:53 pm

oticon6 wrote:http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-414890.html

Already posted in that thread.

Thanks, missed that one for some reason.

freshy98 · Post by **freshy98** » Thu Apr 06, 2006 3:42 pm

I have two Netra T1's.
One is in the process of re-installing with the 2006.0 livecd using RAID 1 with md.
Even booted! Except that i made the mistake to have /dev/md4 in my fstabd instead of /dev/md2... Gonna fix that later tonight.

A Blade 150 I don't have, just a Blade 100 which runs fine with a SUN dual channel SCSI controller, but don't boot from it. Some OBP problems I can't get solved. netboot runs just fine.