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softnotes
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PostPosted: Tue Mar 14, 2006 4:23 pm    Post subject: Sun Blade 2000 Reply with quote

Has anybody had success running on a Sun Blade 2000, is there a preferred release, and are there any issues I should be aware of?

Thanks
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Tzuriel
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PostPosted: Tue Mar 14, 2006 5:46 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

I have a SunBlade 2500 and am interested in hearing any feedback here as well. I have the UltraSPARC IIIi processors whereas the 2000 has UltraSPARCIII, so we're about the same here.
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gust4voz
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PostPosted: Tue Mar 14, 2006 10:53 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Blade 2000 should work fine since it's just a souped-up Blade 1000.
Blade 2500 is another story - basically i've only heard of one user being able to install on it through mail, but no specifics.
Since the 2500 is close to a V240 you'll probably have to use the latest ~sparc silo with a 2.6 kernel to get the best results, though YMMV (you may need to netboot for the initial install).
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Tzuriel
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PostPosted: Tue Mar 14, 2006 11:43 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Well, I just posted my results by using the latest 2006.0 sparc64 install iso which hung on me. You can say it didn't go well. :(
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gust4voz
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PostPosted: Tue Mar 14, 2006 11:52 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

I never said it would work - it probably won't. On a V240 squash has he had to netboot it for the initial install.
Try that, if that doesn't work you can try one of the experimental livecds.
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TheDebugger
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PostPosted: Fri Mar 24, 2006 11:50 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

I just tried to boot Gentoo 2006.0 (Universal CD, 64bit) on a Blade 2000... and was told that there isn't enough memory.
Quote:
Could not find any available memory for initial ramdisk.
Fatal error: you do not have enough continuous memeory available for such initial ramdisk.

Hey, that box has 8GB of RAM!

Btw, I can't find any nettboot images as suggested by the Gentoo Linux Sparc Quick Install Reference?!

Any hints?

Edit: found a bug report
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nl0pvm
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PostPosted: Fri Mar 24, 2006 12:08 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

TheDebugger wrote:

Btw, I can't find any nettboot images as suggested by the Gentoo Linux Sparc Quick Install Reference?!


tftpbootfiles can be found here:
http://dev.gentoo.org/~weeve/tftpboot/

greetz

Peter
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SUN E250 2 x UltrasparcII@400Mhz 512MB RAM 6 x 9GB Kernel 2.6.8 (SMP)
SUN E250 UltrasparcII@400Mhz 512MB RAM 2 x 9GB Kernel 2.6.11
SUN E250 UltrasparcII@400Mhz 1024MB RAM 2 x 9GB
SPARCstation 10 MP 2 x 390Z55@40Mhz 512MB RAM Kernel 2.4.30 4GB & 9GB
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TheDebugger
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PostPosted: Fri Mar 24, 2006 12:31 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

The hardware-workaround (https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=121609) got me going, I'm now booting Gentoo 2006.0 :D
Gotcha, there it is, a root login ...

Ok, btw, why is a 2.4.x kernel used? Is it ok to upgrade to any 2.6.1x kernel?
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mightyhal
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PostPosted: Tue Mar 28, 2006 3:41 am    Post subject: why 2.4 and not 2.6 Reply with quote

Supposedly the 2.6 isn't stable enough. I'm running a Blade 1000 and use the 2.6 kernel quite happily... For all intents and purposes though, 2.6.11+ have all been pretty stable, as far as I can tell. The trick is to
Code:
emerge gentoo-sources
instead of the sparc-sources, since you'll only get 2.4 sources using sparc-sources (since there's not a 2.6 profile yet).

I'm using 2.6.15-rsomething and like it plenty. Sure beats Solaris (what a pain in the neck!).
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TheDebugger
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PostPosted: Tue Mar 28, 2006 7:37 am    Post subject: Re: why 2.4 and not 2.6 Reply with quote

mightyhal wrote:
The trick is to
Code:
emerge gentoo-sources
I'm using 2.6.15-rsomething and like it plenty. Sure beats Solaris (what a pain in the neck!).


Thanks for your message. Yesterday, I learned this the hard way. Did you ever try vanilla-sources-2.6.16? While gentoo-sources-2.6.15-r7 work like a charm for me, vanilla-sources-2.6.16 do not (see https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-447295.html). I would really like to know why?!
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gust4voz
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PostPosted: Tue Mar 28, 2006 11:14 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

2.6.16 is having problems with Blade 1000/2000 machines in general (this includes gentoo-sources, the reason why it isn't even ~sparc).
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TheDebugger
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PostPosted: Tue Mar 28, 2006 11:42 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

gust4voz wrote:
2.6.16 is having problems with Blade 1000/2000 machines in general (this includes gentoo-sources, the reason why it isn't even ~sparc).

Second that. There are problems. Is anyone interested to investigate these? Anything we can do that 2.6.17 is usable again? Btw, due to your reasoning with gentoo sources, ~sparc should be removed from vanilla-sources-2.6.16 as well, others might waste their time as I did ... ?
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gust4voz
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PostPosted: Tue Mar 28, 2006 2:37 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Removed, thanks for noticing.
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Weeve
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PostPosted: Thu Mar 30, 2006 12:42 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

You can get a blade 1000/2000 working on 2.6.16 if you use the qlogic isp fc driver rather than the qlogic qla2xxx driver. However 9 out of 10 kernel maintainers agree that qla2xxx is the preferred way to go. I'm hoping to start getting some better info on the failure on here locally shortly.
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TheDebugger
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PostPosted: Thu Mar 30, 2006 7:41 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Weeve, if there's anything I can do to help, please let me know. The blade is going to sit on my bench for another few days. But as soon as it enters the production environment, I'm out of business re-booting it every other hour to test a new kernel ;)

BTW, thanks for the link posted in the other thread!
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chance2105
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PostPosted: Wed May 10, 2006 10:18 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

I just got a Blade 2k to play with, and am having a little bit of trouble. Mainly the timing seems a bit odd -- X refuses not to blank with only minimal time waiting, wget is constantly timing out thinking that the full thrust of my broadband internet isn't fast enough .. top occasionally shows negative processor utilization .. etc etc.

I noticed that sometimes the issue happens with wget, and sometimes not. Then I noticed something else:


dmesg |grep Bogo

Calibrating delay loop... 675.02 BogoMIPS
Calibrating delay loop... 1.75 BogoMIPS
Total of 2 processors activated (676.77 BogoMIPS).


Cha wha? I'm running a 2x1015 GHz Blade 2k. This seems to be wherre the problem is. Am I alone with this problem (I have never seen this machine fully work, so I'm considering hardware issues) or did I just misconfigure my kernel or something?

Holy cow this thing is a pleasure to use tho, I hope I can get this fixed.
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Weeve
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PostPosted: Thu May 11, 2006 1:58 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

TheDebugger wrote:
Weeve, if there's anything I can do to help, please let me know. The blade is going to sit on my bench for another few days. But as soon as it enters the production environment, I'm out of business re-booting it every other hour to test a new kernel ;)

BTW, thanks for the link posted in the other thread!


Assuming this hasn't been answered elsewhere...

Enable the "Use firmware-loader modules (DEPRECATED)" option. This will result in a new sub-menu in which you will want to enable the "Build QLogic ISP2200 firmware-module" option and everything should work smoothly (its working for me here currently).

Basic problem is if you don't use the route described above, the firmware will attempt to be loaded from the filesystem. This presents a bit of a problem as if you build this driver into the kernel, no filesystem has been mounted yet (as the drives haven't been detected yet either). There is a way to make it work by using an initrd/initramfs at boot time, but that starts getting a little more complicated than is necessary right now.
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chance2105
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PostPosted: Sat May 20, 2006 8:40 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Well, to answer my own question --

2.4 series kernels (gentoo, vanilla) do a suck job for the aforementioned reasons. I don't know why, maybe a motherboard revision that's different, something odd about this particular box? Dunno.

However .. 2.6.16-gentoo-r7 runs beautifully, with Weeve's suggestion for the Qlogic FC driver. And in reality, it seems 2.6.14, 2.6.15 any version works well.

Who knows, but if it works for me ..

chance
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ldeviator
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PostPosted: Mon Dec 11, 2006 9:41 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Weeve wrote:
You can get a blade 1000/2000 working on 2.6.16 if you use the qlogic isp fc driver rather than the qlogic qla2xxx driver. However 9 out of 10 kernel maintainers agree that qla2xxx is the preferred way to go. I'm hoping to start getting some better info on the failure on here locally shortly.


Indeed it does work on the 2.6.16-gentoo-r6 kernel no problemo.

However, now I have the 2.6.19-gentoo-r1 kernel now ... the qlogic isp fc driver is gone! Only the qla2xxx driver remains... here's a thread where I've posted what I tried.... let me know if someone is interested and needs more info... it's almost 4am here and I'm passing out at the keyboard trying to get this to work :)

https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-p-3775183.html#3775183

so.. something about how to get the
A) firmware loaded
B) at boot before the kernel panics :)

thanks
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gust4voz
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PostPosted: Mon Dec 11, 2006 12:56 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

You need sys-block/qla-fc-firmware and probably use genkernel to build an initramfs.
We didn't test it yet so either do so yourself or excercise your patience :-)
genkernel won't cut it without some help either, i'll look into it when i get time and then some testers.
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ldeviator
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PostPosted: Mon Dec 11, 2006 2:58 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

gust4voz wrote:
You need sys-block/qla-fc-firmware and probably use genkernel to build an initramfs.
We didn't test it yet so either do so yourself or excercise your patience :-)
genkernel won't cut it without some help either, i'll look into it when i get time and then some testers.


Welll... I installed that package. Made qla2xxx as a module. Put everything in /lib/firmware in to /lib/firmware on my initramfs using genkernel. Put the module qla2xxx.ko in the initramfs also using genkernel. It got me to the "Please specify a device to boot or shell for a shell". So I did a shell. Verified that everything in /lib/firmware was in place. Did a modprobe qla2xxx and it's still asking for firmware and it's unable to initialized the adapter when I do a dmesg.

It says it found an ISP2200, IRQ 21, iobase <stuff here> ... so it's finding it.. just not loading it all the way... I guess.

So.. I think it's broke :)

If I can help more let me know... otherwise I will wait.. no problem :)

thanks
Nick Mossie
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gust4voz
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PostPosted: Mon Dec 11, 2006 3:08 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

https://launchpad.net/distros/ubuntu/+source/linux-source-2.6.19/+bug/74004 is basically the bug in ubuntu-land.
Gotta check if udev is shipping the firmware loader into the initramfs.
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PostPosted: Mon Dec 11, 2006 4:34 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

I think that's where my knowledge of this is falling flat... what is the firmware loader? Is it a package.. or in package? Should the contents of the sys-fs/udev package be inside the initramfs? ... hmm. genkernel is supposed to put that in there by default right... otherwise I'd say "-no-udev" I think...?

But... you know.. I don't think I saw it in there... oh... all the udev inclusion stuff is commented out in /usr/share/genkernel/gen_initramfs.sh ... that's probably no good :) ... maybe?

I will try getting that udev stuff in the initramfs

thanks
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PostPosted: Wed Dec 13, 2006 4:49 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

I put all the contents of the udev package in the initramfs and got the same thing... so I think there is some glue I'm missing.

Unfortunately my days of Gentoo on Sparc are put on hold for awhile as the hard drive is now crapping out on me so I had to move stuff to an x86 machine.
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