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Lord Funky Biscuit
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PostPosted: Mon Feb 24, 2003 11:46 pm    Post subject: Gentoo on a Challenge S Reply with quote

Has anyone had any success getting Gentoo onto a Challenge S system? I picked one up dirt cheap, but have no idea where to start.... this thing is headless (ie no monitor/keyboard/mouse), so I dont really know where to start with it....


Anyone?
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Kumba
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PostPosted: Tue Feb 25, 2003 4:28 am    Post subject: Re: Gentoo on a Challenge S Reply with quote

Lord Funky Biscuit wrote:
Has anyone had any success getting Gentoo onto a Challenge S system? I picked one up dirt cheap, but have no idea where to start.... this thing is headless (ie no monitor/keyboard/mouse), so I dont really know where to start with it....


Anyone?


One person in the #gentoo-mips chatroom, takev, said he got it working on a Challenge S. I'm told Challenge S systems are based on IP22 design, the same design shared by Indy and Indigo2 machines, so if this is indeed the case, then this shouldn't be a problem.

Regarding the headless nature of the machine, this is where serial console comes into play. I have written up an Installation guide for Gentoo/MIPS, but I'm awaiting approval from the mips developers and a subsequent disecction by those more skilled in the grammatical arts to go through it and provide suggesstions and stuff.

Hopefully it won't be too much longer and I can maybe get it posted, but I'm not sure yet.

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Lord Funky Biscuit
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PostPosted: Tue Feb 25, 2003 11:07 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Sounds quite handy to me.

Feel free to send me a pre-release edition if you need someone to look through it!

Yeah, I've gotten as far as knowing I need to use the serial console, as well as having a converter from the 9? pin (can't remember) network connection to an RJ-45 connection...

But, I have no idea where to get one of those serial console cables.

I'll get there one day.
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Kumba
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PostPosted: Wed Feb 26, 2003 12:09 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Lord Funky Biscuit wrote:
Sounds quite handy to me.

Feel free to send me a pre-release edition if you need someone to look through it!

Yeah, I've gotten as far as knowing I need to use the serial console, as well as having a converter from the 9? pin (can't remember) network connection to an RJ-45 connection...

But, I have no idea where to get one of those serial console cables.

I'll get there one day.


Check Ultraspec Cables, specifically at this link: http://www.ultraspec.com/dcatalog.asp?dID=600600. I got my cable from them off of eBay, but you can also straight order them from their website. Not the greatest site layout (damn confusing to me), but they seem to have this rare cable.

They might be sold out, but I'm not too sure.

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PostPosted: Wed Feb 26, 2003 12:15 am    Post subject: Cobalt Qube 2 + Gentoo Reply with quote

I'd be VERY interested in this.. I've got a cobalt qube 2 right now, and just got rid of Cobalt OS. I was in the process of throwing Debian's MIPS (little endian) on it when I came across this. I can't do much with it or donate my qube 2 because it is production hardware (our corporate website and email). I will do what I can though, does anyone else have a cobalt qube 2? Perhaps I can let certain *trusted* developers hack away on it. Keep going there are people who don't use x86 alive trust me

:lol:
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PostPosted: Wed Feb 26, 2003 1:19 am    Post subject: Re: Cobalt Qube 2 + Gentoo Reply with quote

krondor wrote:
I'd be VERY interested in this.. I've got a cobalt qube 2 right now, and just got rid of Cobalt OS. I was in the process of throwing Debian's MIPS (little endian) on it when I came across this. I can't do much with it or donate my qube 2 because it is production hardware (our corporate website and email). I will do what I can though, does anyone else have a cobalt qube 2? Perhaps I can let certain *trusted* developers hack away on it. Keep going there are people who don't use x86 alive trust me

:lol:


Right now, AFAIK, Gentoo/MIPS stages are big-endian mips currently. I don't think we have any little-endian (mipsel) stageballs lying around. I doubt it'd be too difficult to actually set up a cross-compiler for one though.

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PostPosted: Thu Feb 27, 2003 8:29 pm    Post subject: Re: Cobalt Qube 2 + Gentoo Reply with quote

krondor wrote:
I'd be VERY interested in this.. I've got a cobalt qube 2 right now, and just got rid of Cobalt OS. I was in the process of throwing Debian's MIPS (little endian) on it when I came across this. I can't do much with it or donate my qube 2 because it is production hardware (our corporate website and email). I will do what I can though, does anyone else have a cobalt qube 2? Perhaps I can let certain *trusted* developers hack away on it. Keep going there are people who don't use x86 alive trust me

:lol:


I am still sort of working on this .. I have a RAQ2 that I am using debian on to try and build/bootstrap a litte-endian version of gentoo on. Unfortunately, I also work full time, go to school part time and am a volunteer fire fighter... so my time to work on gentoo comes in very small chunks. One problem that I have had is that I can not find anywhere a list of packages that are needed to create the "stage 1" tar ball, and what EXACTLY should be on the boot image. I have succesfully gotten a complete chroot'ed enviroment working and have been using that for a little while, but it is ~2GB in size. If anyone knows where to find this information please let me know ... I will be more than happy to get this going.
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PostPosted: Thu Feb 27, 2003 11:12 pm    Post subject: Re: Cobalt Qube 2 + Gentoo Reply with quote

xphyr wrote:
I am still sort of working on this .. I have a RAQ2 that I am using debian on to try and build/bootstrap a litte-endian version of gentoo on. Unfortunately, I also work full time, go to school part time and am a volunteer fire fighter... so my time to work on gentoo comes in very small chunks. One problem that I have had is that I can not find anywhere a list of packages that are needed to create the "stage 1" tar ball, and what EXACTLY should be on the boot image. I have succesfully gotten a complete chroot'ed enviroment working and have been using that for a little while, but it is ~2GB in size. If anyone knows where to find this information please let me know ... I will be more than happy to get this going.



The stage building scripts are available on Gentoo's CVS, which you can access via the web.

This is a link to what I believe were the original stage-building scripts created by gerk:
http://cvs.gentoo.org/cgi-bin/viewcvs.cgi/gentoo-src/gerk/multiarch-stagebuilder-r1/

This is the newer stage-building tool that I believe is supposed to become gentoo's official stage-building system, however I don't know if it supports mips yet. It should. The one gerk wrote does do mips, but might need a tiny bit of tweaking for mipsel:
http://cvs.gentoo.org/cgi-bin/viewcvs.cgi/gentoo-src/stager/

Hope that helps. Let us know if you actually get any stages made that work.


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PostPosted: Fri Feb 28, 2003 2:31 pm    Post subject: stage building scripts Reply with quote

Kumba, you are the MAN (or woman ... I don't want to be sexist, and one can never tell on line). I will take a look at the script this weekend and see what I can do with it. Hopefully I can create a NFS root that is usable. (The only way to install onto a RAQ/Cube is to NFS boot them ... so we will see what I can come up with.) Thanks for your help!
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PostPosted: Sat Mar 01, 2003 8:19 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Hey,

I used to have an old Indigo 2 Solid Impact a while ago. I've still got some spares left over, Impact PSU, Extreme Graphics etc etc.

Also got quite a chunky Irix library. I will happily donate them if this ptoject needs them.

Keep up the good work!

FA.
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toojays
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PostPosted: Sat Mar 01, 2003 11:14 pm    Post subject: worked for me Reply with quote

With the help of `Kumba's install guide and a couple of other people on #gentoo-mips, I have successfully installed gentoo on my R4600 Indy. I'm now working on getting X up and running.

Congratulations to everyone who helped get gentoo-mips to this stage.

The only annoyance I have is the lack of ebuilds which are tagged with any kind of mips keyword. Maybe someone could talk to Maik Schreiber about adding mips to the Gentoo stable site (http://gentoo-stable.iq-computing.de), and we could co-ordinate through that site?
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PostPosted: Wed Mar 12, 2003 7:36 pm    Post subject: Little endian - IBM z50 Reply with quote

I would be interested in little-endian ports....

I have a IBM Workpad Z50 that I run netBSD on --- very cool little hpcmips port. It's only a 131 mhz, 512MB CF microdrive, 48 MB ram , but I run X (blackbox) and it has a pcmcia slot and CF slot.

One great thing about the Z50 is battery life, many options available, and I routinely get 5-7 hours of uptime without recharging.

I haven't played with linux on it as the linux-vr stuff is quite dated...

I may be able to offer some help (I am no expert that's for sure) but I only have a little endian (Z50) ...

Keep me in mind

Dave
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PostPosted: Tue Oct 28, 2003 11:40 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

OK, I've been playing with my O2/R5000 this afternoon, and I've made some progress.

First off, I've got it booting via BOOTP/DHCP/NFS-Root from my main Gentoo box. The kernel I'm running on it is the 2.5.47 Linux 64bit/R5000 kernel, from here. It seems to detect most of the hardware fairly well, with the exception of the audio bits (no worries; this is early days :D).

As I said, the root fs is on my main box and mounted vis NFS. I used a Gentoo stage1 tarball, can't remember the link. It's somewhere in the gentoo tree on planetmirror.com, and I assume the other mirrors as well.

Now, I hit problems when I discovered that the Gentoo root fs was missing a lot of things -- like fdisk, mount, ifconfig etc. I tried another root fs I found linked from this page, and with it I was able to partition the disk (4GB SCSI) and make some ext2 filesystems on it. When I tried to mount the filesystems, mount segfaulted with a stack trace etc.

Also, once when I ran 'find' it hard locked. 8O I guess things are still experimental :D

NEXT STEP: downloading the stage2 tarball and trying it out. Hopefully it's more up-to-date than the one with the segfaulting mount 8)
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PostPosted: Tue Oct 28, 2003 11:17 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Hope I don't rain on your parade, but the O2/R5000 is *highly* Experimental. One of the linux-mips guys, iluxa, has been doing a lot of work on it using the latest linux-2.6.0-testX snaps from the linux-mips CVS, but it's still far from bootable and still needs some patching. I am not totally sure on the status of his patches and how well a kernel of the 2.6.0 line will work on those machines, but I believe it is not too far off from being semi-usable.

If you are intent on getting this to work, and want to offer a little help, join #gentoo-mips on irc.freenode.net and see if iluxa is around. He can give you more information on what all needs to be done to make the SGI O2/R5000 usable.

Other variants of the O2, the R10000 and R12000 will not work, although it is believe that the R12000 would not be overly difficult to implement provided someone had hardware to give access too. Mainly, just the speculative execution stuff of those CPUs needs to be worked around. The R12000 has some kind of a switch to turn on and off this feature, while the R10000 doesn't. So one can see which CPU is easier to deal with.


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PostPosted: Wed Oct 29, 2003 5:16 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

The Challenge S is based on an Indy motherboard with the video card replaced with a wide scsi controller and an extra network port. I tried unsuccessfully to boot Linux on my Indy, it loaded the tftpboot.img file and then took a puke on my screen with a stack dump.
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PostPosted: Thu Oct 30, 2003 9:43 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

What network port did you use? The last I heard about the Challenge S was that the RJ-45 network port was on a daughter SCSI card not yet supported by Linux. One had to use the AUI connector to netboot (makes finding an adapter fun, I'll bet).


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PostPosted: Thu Oct 30, 2003 10:39 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

My RJ45 port on my Indy is dead so I have to use the AUI port with a tranceiver. Maybe that is why mine dies.
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PostPosted: Sat Nov 01, 2003 1:20 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Kumba wrote:
it's still far from bootable and still needs some patching.
Well with the 2.5.47 build it seems fairly useable to me. I haven't exactly tested it in depth, but it's definitely bootable; there's no question about that.

Still haven't tried the stage3 tarball; I'll do that soon. I'll have a look on #gentoo-mips as well; I'm willing to help out with the 2.6.0 stuff.
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PostPosted: Tue Nov 04, 2003 7:34 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

stonent wrote:
My RJ45 port on my Indy is dead so I have to use the AUI port with a tranceiver. Maybe that is why mine dies.

Most likely. I'll have to inquire about the status of this daughter SCSI card. I've only got Indy hardware, never gotten ahold of Challenge S/M hardware (Yes, read the wrong way, that doesn't sound right).


ben_h wrote:
Well with the 2.5.47 build it seems fairly useable to me. I haven't exactly tested it in depth, but it's definitely bootable; there's no question about that.

I've heard that 2.5.47 was relatively stable. Granted it's old, though hopefully that will be addressed shortly.


ben_h wrote:
Still haven't tried the stage3 tarball; I'll do that soon. I'll have a look on #gentoo-mips as well; I'm willing to help out with the 2.6.0 stuff.

Any help in that effort is appreciated. I believe iluxa was working on getting the PCI system to work properly last night, but I'm unsure of how far off the system is from being multi-user capable (and stable).


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PostPosted: Fri Jan 02, 2004 3:37 am    Post subject: Cobalt Raq2 or Qube2 Reply with quote

Hey is anyone still interested in getting gentoo to work on the Cobalt Raq2 or Qube2? I have my raq2 running completely Gentoo right now (started with a base Debian install and built over the top of it.) If I get a chance this weekend I may see if I can get a "stage 1" build working ... the idea would be to net boot a stage 1 file system, SSH into the system and build it from there. Let me know if there are any interested people out there.

Mark
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PostPosted: Sun Jan 04, 2004 12:42 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

I'm already working on this (slowly) using the new "catalyst" build system. Unfortunately, while I was playing a game last night, the box hung up, probably due to the reported R5K cache issues noted in 2.4.23+ kernels from linux-mips.org.

Gonna start again after I put a 2.4.22 kernel on the machine, which is the last known "good" kernel that had no cache issues on R5K-based machines.

Good to hear you have a gentoo install running, though I wonder if you've ran into the tulip problems I've mentioned here on these forums and in several other places that occurs in newer kernels?

You might want to visit my dev site for some cobalt-specific patches too:
http://dev.gentoo.org/~kumba/mips/cobalt/ (for 2.4.22+ kernels)

They add some additional functionality. Read the README file for more information.


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PostPosted: Sat Jan 10, 2004 9:46 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Syonyk wrote:
The 4400s are fairly slow chips, compared to the later MIPS series.

I haven't used one, so I can't say what it's comparable to, but I know that my 195mhz R10k CPU whomps all over the 4400s (even the faster ones), and I'd say it's comperable to a mid to high P2 in terms of performance.

My CPU design class is based around MIPS - the CPUs are very easy to pipeline/scale, so the advances in each line are far beyond mhz - the 10ks are a perfect example. Slower, but whomp all over the earlier generation of chip.

-=Russ=-


A seemingly knowledgeable person informed me that the 200MHz R4400's get about 75Megaflops. The 195MHz R10K gets about 400, he added.

Don't quote me, quote him.

I'm not planning on using my machines for desktops, though (soon as I get the !#@%#@!%3210593821059ing install done)... I'm dropping 36.4GB of hard drives into each of them and plan to use them for media computers. Perhaps dual-boot with IRIX or something, since I have this 21" monitor lying around wasting space...

seems a shame, though. These machines are quite nifty, seem well-suited to be a light desktop... just doesn't wanna work that way, though :-(
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PostPosted: Fri Jan 16, 2004 9:27 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

I am also working on a (normal) Linux toolchain/stage 1 package for the Cobalt RaQ2 with a friend of mine (Kees, developer of Lunatix).

Monday I'll take a look if I can make my own MIPSEL stage 1 package and will look for a host. If not finished (assumably, looking at the 'light-speed' of those machines), I have another wednesday and thursday to fool around a bit more.

Yours,

Ed Schouten

PS: Should I write an installation manual as well? :oops:


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PostPosted: Fri Jan 16, 2004 9:48 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Sounds like fun. I just bought an Octane and an Indy, so it looks like I'll be trying to help with the R10K dev...

*ties up an SGI IT chap and pistolwhips him*

R10Ks would be really spiffy if Linux worked on them :-(
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