On Wed, 2005-08-31 at 09:14 -0500, Greg Edwards wrote: > On Mon, Aug 29, 2005 at 07:04:54PM -0600, dann frazier wrote: > | On Fri, 2005-08-26 at 16:55 +0100, Tim Cutts wrote: > | > I've been looking into trying to install Debian on an SGI Altix (in > | > this case, a really baby Altix - one of the new Altix 330 machines). > | > > | > I realise this is probably a forlorn hope, but we'd like to see just > | > how difficult it is. With most of the SGI-specific stuff now in the > | > upstream kernel sources, it seems not beyond the realms of possibility. > | > | Actually I tried to get this working on an Altix by ending debug d-i > | drops to Jesse Barnes a while back. I determined that reading/writing > | from /dev/console started to silently fail once busybox init started - > | anytime before it worked fine. The standard debian kernel seemed to > | work in his Fedora userspace, it was seemingly just a d-i issue. > | Unfortunately, the debug cycle was too high latency so I never finished > | it. > > This may still be happening. About a month ago, I tried booting one of > the daily builds on an Altix: > > http://cdimage.debian.org/pub/cdimage-testing/daily/ia64/ > > and it failed about there. I didn't have time to debug it at the time, > so I just did a minimal install on an HP box, then rsynced the root > over. Interestingly enough, altix works fine with the standard 2.6.12 > debian kernel.
The dailies should be using 2.6.12 now, so can you give it another try (unless the previous version you used was already 2.6.12 - then I expect to see no difference). > | Its good to hear that d-i can work with the right kernel. I'd love to > | know when standard Debian kernels aren't working, especially if someone > | can tell me what's wrong (or give me access to a box remotely to fix > | it). > > I'll try to dig into this today and see if I can isolate what's going > on. Great, thanks. I've been given access to an Altix box as well (thanks Ian), so I might be able to help. > | Once Altix was known to work, my plan is to add an option to the elilo > | graphical menu for an Altix console that will automatically append the > | proper console option. > > Another thing that would be really helpful is to turn on the > "relocatable" option by default in the installer elilo.conf (and the > system copy once in place). Altix requires elilo to use > relocatable support. I see you filed a bug (#324067) for this - cool. I'd suggest adding a code snippet/hint that will allow elilo to determine that it should use relocatable on this system. For instance - how do RH/SuSE make this determination? (This is what Bdale asked last time we brought it up - however, elilo was frozen for sarge and we never did get the install kernel working, so there wasn't much interest in following up). -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
