>>> On 12/5/2015 at 12:09 PM, "Joel C. Ewing" <[email protected]> wrote: > I'm puzzled as to how a load/IPL was initiated on the z890 to install > CentOS for system z on a SCSI drive. That suggests you have some way to > initiate a load from a source other than FCP SCSI. If so, perhaps there > is hope for using a similar technique to load a bootstrap loader that > then loads from SCSI.
And this is the point I was going to make. The install process starts with the "Load from Removable Media or Server." That media can be a DVD in the HMC, or an FTP server somewhere on the network. The HMC looks for files that end with "*.ins" and displays the list of them on the HMC. Each of those files contains a list of _other_ files that are to be loaded into storage, at specified locations, and then executed. The suse.ins file looks like this: boot/s390x/linux 0x00000000 boot/s390x/initrd.off 0x0001040c boot/s390x/initrd.siz 0x00010414 boot/s390x/initrd 0x01000000 boot/s390x/parmfile 0x00010480 What I would recommend is that Connor keep his FTP server updated with whatever kernels, ramdisks, and parmfiles he has installed on his storage array, and use the HMC to boot from them. (These would need to be extracted from disk to the FTP server after every update to the kernel or parameters.) In the parmfile, you can point to where the root file system lives, and the initrd would have the code necessary to activate the SCSI over FCP connection to mount it. It's a bit of a PITA, but should work just fine until such time as he either gets the SCSI IPL feature from IBM installed, or he finds some ECKD storage at a reasonable price. Mark Post ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
