On 10/28/20 6:16 AM, John Paul Adrian Glaubitz wrote:
> On 10/28/20 11:12 AM, Dennis Clarke wrote:
>> Everything seems to just work fine. Until reboot wherein I see :
>>
>> Boot device: /pci@1f,0/pci@1,1/scsi@2/disk@0,0:a File and args:
>> Unrecognized magic number in media label
>> Can't open disk label package
>> Evaluating: boot
>>
>> Can't open boot device
>>
>> ok
>>
>> I am guessing that my mistake was to use a gpt label on the boot disk
>> and the old firmware on this test Netra machine can only grok a sun
>> label. Just a guess. Let me know if this seems reasonable.
>
> Yes, GPT is supported on SPARC T4 and newer only.
>
> Normally, when you use automatic partioning, the installer should detect
> whether your machine supports GPT and if not, use a Sun-based partition
> layout.
I may have mentioned in the past that I *always* use the expert mode
text installer to get the job done. Mostly because I can walk away from
the machine and run the bulk of the installation process remote over a
ssh connection. That is the greatest feature in the installer ever!
Certainly top of the top ten features in an otherwise slick and easy
installer process. I assure you that Red Hat could learn a lot. I hate
their graphical garbage installer.
The other great feature of the expert mode is that I can set the ip
address and not get locked into DHCP. I do have a very small DHCP subnet
but that is only to deal with a few windows clients. Otherwise all hosts
fall into a subnet 172.16.35.1/26 which is for lab systems. It does just
work great and I even have ppc64 and ppp64le running fine. I don't do
anything graphical on those hosts other than some X11 work.
The sparc64 installer from 2020-10-13 works great and the only snag
I hit was self inflicted with the gpt label. I knew when I did it that
it was a mistake but plowed ahead anyways. I do wish there was a way to
get an M3000 or even better an M4000 running as those things have actual
horse power for real world work. The XSCF is not a big deal to manage on
those but I suspect the firmware is the real problem once one gets a
console to a hardware domain. I don't know. I have not tried on those
machines in years and would like to get my M4000 up and running just to
see what happens.
In any case, thank you for the great work and I wanted to simply let
you know that sparc64 seems to work fine for the basic stuff anyone
would want.
--
Dennis Clarke
RISC-V/SPARC/PPC/ARM/CISC
UNIX and Linux spoken
GreyBeard and suspenders optional
