I've been hacking in CVS to try to enable SystemImager to work on IBM's JS20 Blades and Power5, both are ppc64 arch. As of Friday I got a successful redeployment of a SLES9 image off a JS20, and back to the same JS20. I'm now pushing all those changes back into CVS, so anyone else looking to test these things should just run with it. The substantial changes I made were:
* move ppc64 kernel to vanilla 2.6.11 (man this is easier now that Linus
runs a ppc64 on his desktop ;) )
* a brand new kernel config. This is roughly based of the config being
worked on for ppc64 gentoo livecd support, though I made a couple of
changes which I can't remember the details of now
* add *back* sfdisk, openfirmware *really* needs a type 41 partition, and
parted doesn't do that.
* update rsync & reiserfs. The old reiserfs couldn't figure out default fs
on 2.6 kernels, which was causing things to go interactive. Very bad in
this environment. The rsync update is trying to get around some odd
network corruption I saw in 2.5.7. I'm actually not sure that this is
fixed until 2.6.4, but 2.6.3 seems better.
In addition there are a few changes I made which are more generic, and
helped with ppc64, but are also useful elsewhere.
* turned on devfs support in busybox - this appears to have been breaking
other users of CVS HEAD as well as me, so if you tried and fail with CVS
recently, try again.
* turned on klogd and logger in busybox for....
* added syslog support to BOEL
This last one is pretty cool. All echo statements in both autoinstall
scripts and BOEL that were informational only have been replaced to a call
to logmsg instead, which is an internal shell function that will:
1. echo back out
2. append to /tmp/si.log - for env where consoles don't have scrollback
3. push via syslog if syslogd is running
I've been running this for about 2 weeks on the ppc64 porting as the JS20
console is Serial Over Lan, and seeing the messages in syslog on my image
server was just far more convenient.
Anyway, this is all out in CVS HEAD. I'm sure I've forgotten something, so
if you see an issue, please let me know. Any ppc64 testers are *very
encouraged* to let me know how things work for them. I'm not sure that this
will work on Apple computers running Linux, as I don't have any to test on,
but it shouldn't be all that hard to fix that part.
-Sean
--
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Sean Dague Mid-Hudson Valley
sean at dague dot net Linux Users Group
http://dague.net http://mhvlug.org
There is no silver bullet. Plus, werewolves make better neighbors
than zombies, and they tend to keep the vampire population down.
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