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

[Stefan Nürnberger]

> 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.
> 

Uh oh, that does not sound good. I was about to try the -rc1 .. glad I 
didn't ;)


> [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.
> 

Yes, the noise was recognized here, too. The specs from TSS say 
something about the board having a BMC from Renesas (H8S/2166 I 
believe). It should be possible to communicate with it for hardware 
monitoring (temperatures, fan speeds, ...) and adjust the fan speed 
accordingly. It should be an I2C interface. However, I couldn't find any 
information about that. The pre-installed YDL apparently didn't use any 
power management features, either.

Stefan