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lksus
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Joined: 29 Jan 2022
Posts: 4
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 Posted: Sat Jan 29, 2022 8:57 pm Post subject: Help with GRUB on SPARC T4-1 |
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I have been trying to install Gentoo on my SPARC T4-1 server. The installation goes well until it's time to install the bootloader. SILO fails to build, I found out that it doesn't support 64-bit (https://bugs.gentoo.org/702136). In that bug report's comments, someone recommends using GRUB instead. I tried using GRUB but I haven't got it working yet.
I tried using this guide https://github.com/esnowberg/grub2-sparc/wiki with "Installation Instructions for SPARC T3 and below" (because my T4 didn't show GPT support at OpenBoot and firmware update is not possible due to oracle's paywall). I did the following steps:
- emerged GRUB
- added GRUB_PLATFORMS="ieee1275" to /etc/portage/make.conf
- added GRUB_PRELOAD_MODULES="iso9660" to /etc/default/grub
- created /boot/grub directory
- grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg
- grub-install --force --skip-fs-probe /dev/sda1 (my root partition)
GRUB shows up at boot and shows Gentoo Linux on the list, but it throws "UNKNOWN DEVICE: ieee1275//pci@400/pci@1/pci@4/scsi@0/disk@0" error when I select it.
What kind of partition table should I have? The OpenBoot version is 4.33.4, so I should be able to have over 2 gigabytes root partition according the handbook? I currently have root, swap and whole disk partitions (using sun partition table). Should I have a separate /boot partition? I installed GRUB on my root (sda1) partition.
Can anyone help with the GRUB installation, am I missing something? |
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GDH-gentoo
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Joined: 20 Jul 2019
Posts: 1537
Location: South America
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| Posted: Sun Jan 30, 2022 2:23 pm Post subject: Re: Help with GRUB on SPARC T4-1 |
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| lksus wrote: | | GRUB shows up at boot and shows Gentoo Linux on the list, but it throws "UNKNOWN DEVICE: ieee1275//pci@400/pci@1/pci@4/scsi@0/disk@0" error when I select it. |
If at least GRUB boots, you can use its command line interface to look around. Press 'c' from the menu to enter it, and start by using the ls command to show all drives that Open Firmware is presenting to GRUB, and their (ieee1275/whatever) names. Then you can work from there. |
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lksus
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Joined: 29 Jan 2022
Posts: 4
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| Posted: Fri Feb 04, 2022 11:19 pm Post subject: Re: Help with GRUB on SPARC T4-1 |
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| GDH-gentoo wrote: | | lksus wrote: | | GRUB shows up at boot and shows Gentoo Linux on the list, but it throws "UNKNOWN DEVICE: ieee1275//pci@400/pci@1/pci@4/scsi@0/disk@0" error when I select it. |
If at least GRUB boots, you can use its command line interface to look around. Press 'c' from the menu to enter it, and start by using the ls command to show all drives that Open Firmware is presenting to GRUB, and their (ieee1275/whatever) names. Then you can work from there. |
Thank you. I managed to get it to boot into initramfs, but it couldn't find the root partition and continue booting the kernel. /dev didn't have any disks showing.
After that I tried a new install with a separate boot partition. I managed to install SILO on it from a 32-bit userland live-cd installation. I managed to get initramfs to boot with that too, but it couldn't still find the root partition. I gave it to it with root=/dev/sda4 flag on the SILO config.
I also tried to boot the kernel without initramfs from SILO. It did a kernel panic: "Kernel panic - not syncing: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on unknown-block(0,0)". I gave it the root=sda4 kernel configuration with SILO. I don't know what's wrong with this anymore. |
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Hu
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Joined: 06 Mar 2007
Posts: 21638
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| Posted: Sat Feb 05, 2022 12:10 am Post subject: |
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| If there is no device node for the disk in /dev, then that usually means the kernel does not know how to operate the disk. Until you fix that, neither direct boot nor initramfs boot can succeed. You will need to identify which Kconfig symbol(s) control the driver for your disk, enable those, and build a new kernel. |
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lksus
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Joined: 29 Jan 2022
Posts: 4
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| Posted: Sat Feb 05, 2022 10:36 am Post subject: |
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| Hu wrote: | | If there is no device node for the disk in /dev, then that usually means the kernel does not know how to operate the disk. Until you fix that, neither direct boot nor initramfs boot can succeed. You will need to identify which Kconfig symbol(s) control the driver for your disk, enable those, and build a new kernel. |
Thank you. Why didn't I think of that before. I was missing the mpt3sas kernel module. The hard drives are connected to a LSI SAS controller on this machine. Now it worked fine. |
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Hu
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Joined: 06 Mar 2007
Posts: 21638
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| Posted: Sat Feb 05, 2022 4:58 pm Post subject: |
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Well done. For the benefit of future readers (as unlikely as that may be on a SPARC  ), it looks like the Kconfig symbols you needed were:- SCSI_MPT3SAS for the mpt3sas kernel module
- SCSI_3W_SAS for LSI SAS card
Recording them here should make it easier for anyone else with this problem to find and enable the right kernel options. |
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Gentoo on Sparc
