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liSurfer
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PostPosted: Sat Sep 13, 2003 5:05 pm    Post subject: Ultra Sparc 1 -- Silo Kernel Issue Reply with quote

Hello,

I've gone through the installation documentation provided by the people at Gentoo.org for ultra sparc. I'm up to the Silo part in doc but am receiving an error when I run 'silo' from the cli.

/etc/silo.conf appears to be valid
Fatal error: Couldn't read new silo bootblock from /boot/ultra.b

Is there a way to recreate this .b file i couldn't find it in /usr/src/linux. I'm not quite sure what the .b file is a product of or if it's from silo's emerge. Any information on .b files or this problem would be greatly appreciated.

TIA,
Ryan
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pjp
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PostPosted: Sun Sep 14, 2003 1:45 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Maybe a Sparc user will find it better here.


Moved from Installing Gentoo.
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Weeve
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PostPosted: Sun Sep 14, 2003 11:06 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

You can re-create /boot/ultra.b by re-emerging sys-apps/silo.

Also if you made your /boot a different partition, make sure it's mounted.
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bazik
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PostPosted: Mon Sep 15, 2003 4:00 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Try this:

1) backup your silo.conf
2) mount /boot
3) emerge unmerge silo
4) rm -f /boot/*
5) emerge silo
6) copy silo.conf back to /boot
7) silo -C /boot/silo.conf

If this doesnt work, what version of silo are you using?
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liSurfer
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PostPosted: Mon Sep 15, 2003 8:58 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

ahh sooo close fellas!

Ok I followed the last advice and have succesfully been able to 'silo' but upon boot time SILO says it cannot find my kernel image 'vmlinux' which resides in /boot. it states

"Cannot find /boot/vmlinux (Unknown ext2 error)
Image not found.... try again"


tia,
Ryan :oops:
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Weeve
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PostPosted: Mon Sep 15, 2003 9:08 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

When at the silo prompt, if you type

Code:
boot: /vmlinux root=/dev/sda4


(where sda4 is your root parition) does this boot correctly?
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bazik
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PostPosted: Mon Sep 15, 2003 9:19 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

liSurfer wrote:
ahh sooo close fellas!

Ok I followed the last advice and have succesfully been able to 'silo' but upon boot time SILO says it cannot find my kernel image 'vmlinux' which resides in /boot. it states

"Cannot find /boot/vmlinux (Unknown ext2 error)
Image not found.... try again"


tia,
Ryan :oops:


Hmm but you did copy your vmlinux from /usr/src/linux/ to /boot/ before doing step 7) ?

Sorry that I forgot to mention that important step! :)
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Weeve
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PostPosted: Mon Sep 15, 2003 10:09 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

I'm guessing what happened is if he rm -rf'd /boot/* then the symlink in /boot to itself has been removed, so if /boot is it's own partition, /boot/vmlinux is no longer a valid path.
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liSurfer
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PostPosted: Mon Sep 15, 2003 10:21 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Still the same error message. I renamed the file and edited the config file properly to call it vmlinuz. Still the same problem. What is mounting /boot before the kernel is even loaded???? Also, is it important to create a partition that represents the size of the disk? I skipped that part so my root partition is /dev/sda3 not sda4.


tia,
Ryan
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Weeve
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PostPosted: Mon Sep 15, 2003 10:27 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

It can be yes, particularly if you want Solaris to access it. Every once and a while a problem like this will crop up where having a whole disk partition makes it go away.

Did you try my suggestion at the command line?
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liSurfer
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PostPosted: Tue Sep 16, 2003 1:50 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

yes but my question is. wouldn't "/vmlinux" denote that the kernel was in the root of the root partition? when in reality it's in /boot?


TIA,
Ryan
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Weeve
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PostPosted: Tue Sep 16, 2003 2:05 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

If you have /boot setup as it's own partition, then SILO thinks / is whatever your boot partition is as it isn't loading off the partition specified as root in your config.
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liSurfer
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PostPosted: Tue Sep 16, 2003 2:28 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

So to clarify. My harddrive looks as follows.

/ /dev/hda3
/boot /dev/hda1
swap /dev/hda2

so my Silo.conf should look like this.

parition = 1 # denoting boot
root = /dev/sda3

image = /boot/vmlinuz
label = gentooDUDE


tia,
Ry.
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PostPosted: Tue Sep 16, 2003 4:46 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

exchange hda for sda....sorry.
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PostPosted: Tue Sep 16, 2003 5:13 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

liSurfer wrote:

image = /boot/vmlinuz


/boot/vmlinux

And make sure, as Weeve said, that the symlink in /boot/ still exists (as you did the `rm -f /boot/.*` .

If not, `mount /boot`, `cd /boot`, `ln -s boot ../boot/`
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PostPosted: Sat Sep 20, 2003 6:13 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

SILO is finding the kernel I think because now it outputs an error that says, the kernel is too big. I don't blame it, it's 3Megs so i'm recompiling again. Question though, I've compiled kernels for slackware using the source from kernel.org. After 'make bzImage' and the rest of the make's in the /usr/src/linux directory is a vmlinuz kernel which is usually very large. Then in arch/i386 is the bzImage which is considerably smaller. I found no smaller kernel on the sun box after compilation. Only the vmlinux that is 3MB. Is there a bzImage compilaition? I tried it and it didn't work. It said no make target.


tia,

Ryan
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Weeve
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PostPosted: Sun Sep 21, 2003 12:51 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

3.5MB is the limit for kernel sizes on sparc. There is no compressed building target right now as the kernel size is always dependent on the uncompressed size.

sparc kernels are always noticibly larger than x86, perhaps due to the way RISC arch is setup.
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PostPosted: Sun Sep 21, 2003 1:25 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Concerning kernel size: I read somewhere -- sparclinux mailing list? -- that
if the kernel is too big, stripping it might help. I have found this to
be true. I am running a kernel which unstripped is too big:
Code:

terciopelo linux # wc vmlinux
  35817  175700 3894459 vmlinux


But, after stripping it to remove symbols, thus:
Code:

cp vmlinux /boot
cd /boot
strip vmlinux
terciopelo boot # wc vmlinux
  35567  171874 3281112 vmlinux

and it boots fine. (It's the one running for this post.)
This should probably be in the installation guide, if it isn't.
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