IA 64 Install, Trouble Booting

[thaller]

Good Afternoon everyone.

Just a little background, Gentoo has been my "Desktop" OS of choice for a while now, I've been using it since 2007, and I've never had any major issues, until now.

I recently got my hands on an HP rx5670 Integrity Server, which has Intel Itanium2 Processors in it (4 way) & 8GB of ram.

This is a 100% SCSI System, including the CD-ROM.

I can get the System to boot to EFI, then I can get EFI to launch the latest minimal install cd for IA64, however it will not boot any further.

I get a "cannot open root device" or somthing similar like that (I'm away from the box right now)

It seems it cannot find the SCSI CD to mount as the new root.

I have tried passing doscsi as a boot argument, as well as hdb=scsi, cdcache.

Nothing seems to work.

If I enter the shell @ the error, there are no block devices in /dev (only tty & pty etc.)

I'm thinking that the cd is missing the kernel modules I require, or I am missing something.

Any Help would be appreciated.

Thanks,

[cach0rr0]

out of sheer curiosity, have you tested any other IA64 install media to see if this is something specific to the official Gentoo media?

Might try the IA64 image from here - http://cdimages.ubuntu.com/ubuntu-server/ports/daily/current/

Should be noted, in case you aren't aware, any modern linux distro's CD can be used to do a gentoo install.
So if that boots for you, and all else fails, you can do the gentoo install from the Ubuntu CD

other possibilities - will that system boot from a USB device? If so, should be a simple enough operation to make yourself a LiveUSB from the minimal IA64 image
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[thaller]

I have tried the ubuntu server port, as well as the ubuntu livecd, and I get a different issue, The initial root disk loads, then no further output. It seems it is not selecting the correct serial console, therefore I cannot see the rest of the boot process. I have tried different combos of boot arguments to no avail.

Things I have tried to get the serial console working:

console=ttyS[0-3],9600n8
console=ttyS[0-3]
console=hcdp



Gentoo is the only one so far that is doing that part (displaying to the console) correctly.

However I have the mounting root issue as stated above.

Thanks for your reply/suggestion.

[thaller]

I have downloaded Fedora 9 for IA64 and will be trying that shortly, however I would like to get Gentoo working as it is my distro of choice.

[Hu]

Once you get any reasonably functional Linux booted, you can use that as a host platform for installing Gentoo. The Gentoo CDs are just provided as a convenient way of getting a minimal and usually functional Linux environment.

[thaller]

Are you saying that the Gentoo Minimal install cd does not have the scsi modules included? That seems strange because I though SATA used the SCSI kernel interface and I've had no issues using SATA drives before.

Is there anything I can try from the busybox shell to get the scsi drives recognized, then continue the boot?



Any ideas as to why gentoo starts booting with the serial console ok (by default), and all the others so far have had trouble?

I've tried:

console=ttyS[0-3],9600,n8
console=ttyS[0-3]
console=hdcp

hdcp is suppose to use what efi is set to use, which is configured correctly.

Also a point to note is that the console's serial connection is though the Management Processor and is the only serial port available on the box.

Serial Console is the only method for this system as it is a headless server.

[eccerr0r]

I've only got a Dell Poweredge 3250, unfortunately, and I have never used the rx5670 but have worked with rx2600s -

The only top concern is that if the default kernel on the mininstaller has scsi-cd built in. As far as I know, the Gentoo development systems all use ICH4 IDE CDROMs using the legacy IDE driver and may have forgotten this case. (I also tried using the libata driver which appears to fail on my PE3250, so that's probably why it was omitted?). I unfortunately don't have a cd or machine handy (I don't have a way to hook up my scsi cdrom to my PE3250 anyway...), is it possible to modprobe sr_mod perhaps?

Will have to check with Raul to see about this case...

In the mean time, when it says it can't find root device, is it talking about the initrd root (does it actually load the initrd) or is it complaining about the squashfs root (the second root that it needs to chroot to)?
_________________
Core2Quad 9550S/4GB/4x500G RAID5/RadeonHD 5770
What the heck am I advocating?

[thaller]

it is indeed complaining about the second root.

The initrd loades fine.

[eccerr0r]

See if you can:

modprobe sr_mod # I believe the SCSI controller in the rx5670 should be the same as all other HP's - the LSI based one
lsscsi # Does this even work? Not sure if it's in the initrd or not, likely not
cat /proc/scsi/scsi # this is obsolete by lsscsi, but maybe it's still there
dmesg # did it mention any CD drives or SCSI even?

I don't recall if my PE3250 could boot off of USB. It only had USB1.1 ports, and I'm not sure if the rx5670 had any? I'm having a hard time recalling if the installer supported USB boot, but if it did, it should have sr_mod, leading to believe there's a SCSI issue at hand..

http://www.ia64-linux.org/machines/rx5670.html
_________________
Core2Quad 9550S/4GB/4x500G RAID5/RadeonHD 5770
What the heck am I advocating?

[thaller]

I'll try this asap

my rx5670 does not have any usb (its an add on card, bundled with the graphics card)

Thanks

[armin76]

Can you please post the boot log?

Thanks

[thaller]

You are referring to the console output during the entire boot procedure correct?

[thaller]

I have collected a bunch of output to try and help figure out what is going on...

Boot Log: http://pastebin.com/m37782229
Starting from the EFI Shell

DMESG: http://pastebin.com/f58059576

ls -al /dev/: http://pastebin.com/f2050916d

lsmod: http://pastebin.com/f7a827ac8

If you need anything else, let me know.


Thanks in advanced for everyone's help.

[eccerr0r]

hmm... no scsi host adapter found It should be supported though. Is your machine known to be working? It didn't seem to detect your hard disks either.

On the other page it looks like the rx5670 has a 53c896 and a 53c1010 and your disks could be hooked up to one or the other. IIRC the 53c1030 is what my ia64 machine uses and that's controlled by the FusionMPT driver which a lot of the later ia64 machines use.

The 53c896 and 53c1010 appear to require the sym53c8xx_2 driver... modprobe it?

Might need to try some other distributions' boot disks (SuSE, etc...) Omitted driver or broken/missing scsi host adapters?
_________________
Core2Quad 9550S/4GB/4x500G RAID5/RadeonHD 5770
What the heck am I advocating?

[thaller]

If you mean if this physical machine is in working order, then yes, it currently has HP-UX 11i v2 installed on it, which I am trying to replace.

If you mean is the machine type (rx5670) is supported, then I'm not 100% sure, however I have seen many post/hints around the web indicating that a linux variant is working on a rx5670, even one of the Gentoo developer boxes is an HP integrity (although not an rx5670 ).

[eccerr0r]

Yes your machine should be supported by Linux, but perhaps the sym53c8xx_2 driver was omitted from the Gentoo installer cd. But I can't imagine why. If you use some other distribution's boot cd you could use that to install the stage3 and build your own kernel to bootstrap your machine?

The Gentoo dev boxes I think are the Integrity rx2620 and rx2600, and probably another I don't remember... Both these are slightly newer than the rx5670.

When I was working on the rx2600 machines at work (not for Gentoo) there were rx5670's lying around here and there, I never got to take a good look at them, except that they're huge!!!
_________________
Core2Quad 9550S/4GB/4x500G RAID5/RadeonHD 5770
What the heck am I advocating?

[thaller]

Perhaps an older version of the minimal install CD has the required driver?

I have tried Ubuntu to get the install going however I can't even get that to choose the correct serial port for the console.

I have the following post on that topic.

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=8581679#post8581679

If you have suggestions for that, that would be awesome too, anything that helps to ultimately get Gentoo running is what I need.


Thanks

[armin76]

Let me build a cd with the drivers eccerr0r said.

Hope you have cdrw's around!

Btw, we're on #gentoo-ia64 @ irc.freenode.net in case you want to do this through irc.

[thaller]

That would be amazing!

Thank You, very much! armin76.

I'd join you on IRC however the security group has that blocked here @ work.

Thanks again.

[armin76]

Here it is.

http://dev.gentoo.org/~armin76/install-ia64-minimal-testcd.iso

[thaller]

Thank you very much!

I have downloaded the iso, and will burn it shortly.

It may be a few days before I can test this (given the holiday coming up & end of year jobs to do), however I will be sure to report back with the results.

Thanks again & Happy New Year!

[armin76]

Have you got around to test it?

[thaller]

I was actually going to post to today

I've been preparing that server for this install and part of it was wiping 30+ scsi disks.

I was going to do that though the new Gentoo install, when I ran into problems.

So instead I started it under the current hp-ux install. They should be done by next week, so hopefully I'll have some developments then.

Thanks,
_________________
Ty Haller
Systems Administrator, SEFCU

[thaller]

I tried the new build, it is now seeing the scsi disks and cdrom (YAY!).

However it now hangs at a later point.

It does not produce an error, it just hangs and requires a hard reboot.

Here is the entire boot log.
http://paste2.org/p/649522

Thanks for everyone's help
_________________
Ty Haller
Systems Administrator, SEFCU

[armin76]

Hrm...where do you see the cdrom detected?