Hi Everyone, I've been punching myself in the junk for the last two weeks trying to get OpenSolaris 0906 to install on a machine that I've put together for that purpose. No - I didn't check the HCL before I bought (got swept up in some eBay madness).
The system is comprised of: Tyan S2937 motherboard (bios rev 3.00 - latest) 4 GB DDR2 memory 2x Opteron 2216 2x 500G Sata disks The motherboard has an Nvidia n3600T chipset. I've successfully completed days on end of memtestx86, a torture test using OCCT under Windows XP, a Xensource XenServer installation, and a few other Linux installs (CentOS, Ubuntu 7.10 - all trying to figure out what does doesn't work). I can boot OpenSolaris as an HVM DomU under a couple of these other OS installs - but can't get it to run on bare metal. I'm NOT able to boot recent Ubuntu releases (8.04 to present), or the last two major releases of OpenSolaris (haven't tried any earlier). I believe the hardware is ok - though the BIOS might be a little bit sketchy. I've tried dozens of different bios tweaks to no effect (everything on to everything off, and most everything in between) - though I was able to break things a little bit more spectacularly. I'm also no able to boot the Sun check tool, though I was able to boot the "Intel Linux Ready firmware developers kit" - which ran and has a couple of gripes that guided my BIOS tweaks but didn't get me any closer to a booting OpenSolaris box... The specs for the board can be found here: http://www.tyan.com/support_download_datasheets.aspx?model=S.S2937 Best case scenario I'm able to get a 'Machine Check Exception' followed by a quick reboot. Worst case I get a hang after 'Probing Device Nodes' I've booted with -v, and with a couple different combinations of debugging options gleaned from googling: with -kd cmi_panic_on_uncorrectable_error/W0 :c cmi_no_init/W1 :c With -kdv psm_install:b :c apic_forceload/W -1 :c I'm trying to work on a serial cable so that I can capture a machine check exception and post it - but it's slow going. This clearly isn't a purely OpenSolaris problem based on the fact that more recent Linux kernels will also not boot - but strangely older ones seem ok. I don't have a copy of Solaris proper - so haven't been able to test with that. Does anyone have any advice for things that I can try in the mean time? Any set of options I can pass via Grub or the kernel debugger to let it know it's got a tough slog ahead and to take it easy? Thanks for any help you can give! Graeme -- This message posted from opensolaris.org
