We recently upgraded our Sparc64 Gentoo box. When we rebooted we got an error at the console when trying to boot that just said Sprogram terminated. It turns out that this was caused by an error with the SILO boot records.
See this article for more information on installing SILO. To get our system to boot correctly again, we simply booted our root partition with install-sparc64-minimal-2005.1.iso available here and re-ran silo:
# silo /etc/silo.conf appears to be valid # ls -l /boot total 4052 -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 560753 Dec 31 2004 System.map lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 1 Dec 31 2004 boot -> . -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1024 Sep 3 06:53 fd.b -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 512 Sep 3 06:53 first.b -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1024 Sep 3 06:53 generic.b -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 816 Sep 3 06:53 ieee32.b -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 7192 Sep 3 06:53 isofs.b -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 3441776 Dec 31 2004 kernel-2.4.27 -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 7680 Dec 31 2004 old.b -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 64512 Sep 4 05:48 second.b -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 62398 Sep 3 06:53 silotftp.b -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 512 Sep 3 06:53 ultra.b # date Sun Sep 4 05:49:19 PDT 2005 velasca src # |
You can see that the second.b record was changed when we re-ran SILO.
Also, you can see that the upgrade yesterday did touch some of the other boot records. We have never seen Gentoo mess with these records on our other boxes, but we usually run a custom kernel and don’t let Gentoo emerge those.
Anyway, do be aware of this behavior.
