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

[Mel Gorman]

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 is a tad 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.

-- 
Mel Gorman
Part-time Phd Student                          Linux Technology Center
University of Limerick                         IBM Dublin Software Lab