Gentoo on RS6000 B50 HOWTO - first draft

[himpierre]

Your wish is my order.

MOD EDIT: Link broken, removed. --plate

regards
Thomas

[oizone]

[hgfischer]

I've tryed to boot with rs6000-linux-2.4.16-zimage.chrp-rs6k but I got the following error message:

===============================================
0 > boot floppy:,zImage root=/dev/fd0 load_ramdisk=1
chrpboot starting: loaded at 0x00400000
gunzipping (0x00010000 <- 0x00416470: 0x00534a7c)...done 2908456 bytes
47376 bytes of heap consumed, max in use 40944
start address = 0x10000
instantiating rtas at 00600000 ... done
copying OF device tree...done
Calling quiesce ...

Unespected Firmware Error:
DEFAULT CATCH!, code=fff00200 at %SRR0: 0027x290 %SRR1: 00083000
ok
0 >
===============================================

Any idea on how to fix this ??

My system is a:

- IBM 7046-B50
- PowerPC, 604e, 375Mhz
- 4x256MB RAM
- No graphics adapter
- firmware TCP00059


Another question... How and were I can get firmware updates for this system?

Thanks,

Herbert

[hgfischer]

[hgfischer]

Hi again...

It's anybody out there ?? ha

I was able to boot another chrp kernel, but now I'm not being able to do the floppy-cd boot to start gentoo instalation. I'm trying Gentoo 2004.1 and I think that something is different from the Gentoo used on this HOWTO.

I'm trying exactly the command "boot floppy:,zImage root=/dev/scd0 load_ramdisk=1", but I got error messages like:

Warning: unable to open an initial console.
Kernel panic: No init found. Try passing init= option to kernel.
ibm,fw-n-rc
<0>Rebooting in 180 seconds..

[eventhorizon]

hgfischer mentioned:

I've tryed to boot with rs6000-linux-2.4.16-zimage.chrp-rs6k but I got the following error message:

===============================================
0 > boot floppy:,zImage root=/dev/fd0 load_ramdisk=1
chrpboot starting: loaded at 0x00400000
gunzipping (0x00010000 <- 0x00416470: 0x00534a7c)...done 2908456 bytes
47376 bytes of heap consumed, max in use 40944
start address = 0x10000
instantiating rtas at 00600000 ... done
copying OF device tree...done
STARTING CPU / CPUS/POWERPC,604@1....OK
Calling quiesce ...

Unespected Firmware Error:
DEFAULT CATCH!, code=fff00200 at %SRR0: 0027x290 %SRR1: 00083000
ok
0 >
===============================================

I have the same problem on a chrp F50 ( diff lines putted in capitals )

Somebody has an idea ( firmware F50 : 04197 , zImage downloaded from Rocklinux ) ??

Greetz;
Eventhorizon
_________________
Never underestimate the power of LInux

[Progman3K]

hgfischer, were you able to update your firmware?
Were you able to get Gentoo installed?

I have the same RS6000 as you; 7046-B50

For your firmwares, check out this page:
http://www14.software.ibm.com/webapp/set2/firmware/gjsn?mode=1&mtm=7046-B50

You can bring your revision up to TCP05287

Please let me know how you made out, I'm currently trying to get Gentoo on my machine and I already posted about it here:
https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?p=3291063

If anyone has a simple procedure, please post. Thanks.

[ironfist]

How I finally managed to install Gentoo on a 7046-B50.

Hardware: 7046-B50
CPU: 604r 1MB Cache (604e on steroids..)
HDD: 2x 9.1GB
512MB RAM
CDROM
FDD
No PPC graphics board. I used a Matrox Mystique and a Voodoo 2 during all this..
NIC: Internal PCnet32 and 3com 509 (10/100) if the first would fail.
Latest firmware from October/November 2005

Most of the installation was done over console and then SSH.

1. Install OpenSUSE 10.0 PPC the CD boots perfectly from SMS/Select install device
This SUSE installation was a real PITA over console at 9600 bps. The ANSI is terribly
slow and Minicom has problems showing the ANSI. This took several hours and many
different attempts. It often b0rked and complained that I must install a bootloader
which isn't really possible on this machine.

2. After this I could boot the installation from the CD's. Abort installation and choose to boot into installed system

3. I never got PCnet32 working from SUSE (guess they didn't include that in the kernel) so I
had to burn the Gentoo files (portage snapshot and stage3 archive) to CDRW together with
Gentoo-sources, GCC 4.1 and other utils you need during installation.

4. Then I installed Gentoo to my second (dev/sdb1) harddrive, just to be able to chroot
into it. When it appeared to work fine I formatted sda and installed into there, chrooted
and so on. Now, don't do my mistake and forget to set a root password!. I forgot that but
managed to fix it by booting the SUSE CD in Rescue mode with my Gentoo-partition as root.

Important things to do here:
Set up a network manually and make sure it's started in RC. rc-update add net.eth0 default
Set up sshd: rc-update add sshd default

This is important since there's a high probability both the screen output and console output will
fail during boot. You really want to be able to ssh it.

5. I compiled a kernel (make defconfig) and then removed and selected the things my hardware need.
(CHRP, 6xx CPU). Having a large Minicom scrollback is very helpful here to see what hardware
SUSE initilized. To make it easy I compiled in modules for my graphic cards and PCnet32 in
the kernel. The kernel is too big for FDD anyway.. I put the kernel vmlinux, zImage.chrp and
zImage.chrp-rs6k in /.

6. I put Yaboot and Yaboot.conf from the Gentoo Universal PPC Install CD on a CDRW and used it to boot.
From Open Firmware:
boot cdrom:\yaboot

In Yaboot:
/pci@80000000/scsi@10/sd@2,0:4,zImage.chrp-rs6k root=/dev/sda4

This boots zImage.chrp-rs6k from the first HDD (SCSI ID2), fourth partition using the same as root.

My partition setup:
sda1 PReP PPC Boot
sda2 swap 1GB
sda3 70-or-so MB partition that I will use FAT16 on. Latest Firmware rev reads FAT16.
sda4 / of the rest
sdb1 9GB

Well, I'm still working on this machine (compiling another kernel with FAT-support right now). But it works
as it should and the network is set up properly.

EDIT:
I fixed Yaboot to autoboot the machine.

Here is /etc/yaboot.conf (is on my root partition)

[ThorstenHirsch]

FYI: Ubuntu 6.06 (Dapper Drake) runs (nearly) out-of-the box on a 43p-150 (including yaboot!).

Here some hints for the installation:

- if your graphics card is not supported by X.org you must use the "alternative cd image" in order to run the installation in text mode
- you should upgrade an old firmware to the latest version available
- if you don't have a device alias called "cd" (yaboot may complain about this), you can add it persistently with this command in OF: nvalias cd=<pci-address>
(the <pci-address> is the output of "devalias cdrom")
- /dev/sda1 must be a small PReP boot partition (e.g. 8MB)
- the installation will fail to install yaboot, you need to do this by hand, so reboot the cd in rescue mode, open a shell, "export TERM=linux", "mount /cdrom", "cp /cdrom/install/yaboot.conf /etc", "chmod +w /etc/yaboot.conf", "dd if=/usr/lib/yaboot/yaboot of=/dev/sda1", edit yaboot.conf somehow like this:

[ThorstenHirsch]

Alright, the card is working with fbdev driver at 1024x768x8.
Unfortunately it does not work with a higher color depth.
_________________
alias bauerbob