[powerstation-owners] Testing and OF question ...

[Sven Luther]

On Wed, Oct 29, 2008 at 05:40:02PM +0000, Mel Gorman wrote:
> On Wed, Oct 29, 2008 at 03:47:13PM +0000, Paul Nasrat wrote:
> > > That said, i have another question, concerning the OF implementation of
> > > the powerstation. I tried to boot a custom CD on it, but failed at the
> > > OF level.
> > >
> > > Is there any documentation of the powerstation firmware, and its
> > > capability with regard to CD booting ?
> > 
> > I successfully booted and installed Fedora 10 Alpha from DVD, by
> > setting boot-device using the nvram command in the installed image. It
> > installed fine but I've now got a broken box and can't get into SLOF
> > to
> > 
> 
> What kernel does Fedora 10 Alpha use? I've booted 2.6.27 on mine for the
> purposes of running SpecCPU on it as part of testing[1]. It seems fine with
> Debian Testing installed on it (bootloader install was no fun). However,
> I know that 2.6.28-rc1 will corrupt the NVRAM on some PPC64 machines and
> it's possible the powerstations are affected as well. I haven't tested on
> mine as I only found that this bug only affects mainline today and am in the
> process of pinning down when this occured. It also impacts SLES 11 Beta 2
> and SLES 11 Beta 3. The symptons are that you cannot find your boot-loader
> any more and it drops you to a management console (not OF). The workaround
> on the ppc64 boxes I've seen this problem on is to
> 
> 1. Go to OF prompt
> 2. dev nvram
> 3. wipe-nvram
> 4. Machine reboots and select an older kernel
> 
> I don't know what affect this will have on the powerstation though so try
> it at your own risk if you reckon the problem applies. The "workaround"
> is to upgrade the firmware but I'm rattling a few cages to see can I find
> a better explanation for the problem.
> 
> > >From what I can tell SLOF defaulted to just the disk and doesn't seem
> > to be picking up USB to allow getting into it.
> > 
> > I've seen the press 's' to enter via the debug serial port but I'm not
> > getting any joy.
> > 
> 
> [1] Aside from this, I used the powerstation as a desktop for a few days. It
> was pretty sweet but I couldn't deal with the noise of the CPU fans in the long
> term. When I use the box, I put it outside the house to dampen the noise. Is
> this a general problem? I tried replacing the fans in case it was the bearings,
> but it doesn't help as they just spin up too fast under the lighest of loads.

Same complaint here :/

Friendly,

Sven Luther