There are 7 parts to this article:
Part 1 – Gentoo on SPARC – Booting the Install CD
Part 2 – Gentoo on SPARC – Creating the Filesystems
Part 3 – Gentoo on SPARC – Copying Initial System, Portage, and Distfiles
Part 4 – Gentoo on SPARC – Creating the Kernel
Part 5 – Gentoo on SPARC – Getting Silo Installed
Part 6 – Gentoo on SPARC – Initial Logon
Part 7 – Gentoo on SPARC – Final Configuration
We have a couple of SPARC Ultra Enterprise 2 boxen in our lab. We got them at auction back in 2002, so they are quite old, but still very useful for our lab. We wrote about installing Gentoo on them a couple of years ago in this article. At that time, Silo was full of sadness and hurt when we tried to use it, and we had to do a funky install. Well, Agatha has been running Gentoo continuously on her main workstation for over two years now, and the time seemed right to give Gentoo another try on the SPARC. The instructions below were tested on both boxen. Our priority was doing as little as possible to get the OS up and running, and configure the rest as needed. There is very good documentation on how to do an install here. Generally, all you need to do to get a GNU/Linux system operational is to copy the working system to the box, compile a kernel for the hardware, get the boot loader working, and customize the system. By concentrating on booting the system first, we waste time working on something that simply won’t boot. This has been particularly important for us when installing on old SPARC boxen, because sometimes you *can’t* get the system to boot. The /proc/cpuinfo for the boxen are:
cpu : TI UltraSparc I (SpitFire) fpu : UltraSparc I integrated FPU promlib : Version 3 Revision 11 prom : 3.11.2 type : sun4u ncpus probed : 2 ncpus active : 2 Cpu0Bogo : 398.95 Cpu0ClkTck : 000000000bebd086 Cpu1Bogo : 399.76 Cpu1ClkTck : 000000000bebd086 MMU Type : Spitfire State: CPU0: online CPU1: online cpu : TI UltraSparc II (BlackBird) fpu : UltraSparc II integrated FPU promlib : Version 3 Revision 11 prom : 3.11.2 type : sun4u ncpus probed : 2 ncpus active : 2 Cpu0Bogo : 591.46 Cpu0ClkTck : 0000000011a4aa0d Cpu1Bogo : 591.46 Cpu1ClkTck : 0000000011a4aa0d MMU Type : Spitfire State: CPU0: online CPU1: online |
The first thing we want to do is boot from the Universal LiveCD by pushing a hardware break command out of minicom (or your favorite terminal or terminal emulator) and boot the CD ROM:
Rebooting with command: boot cdrom Boot device: /sbus/SUNW,fas@e,8800000/sd@6,0:f File and args: SILO -- Welcome to Gentoo SPARC Linux -- -- Version 2004.3 -- boot: gentoo-2.4 >> CD medium found on /newroot/dev/cdroms/cdrom0 >> Determining root device... >> Filling tmpfs... >> Mounting loop filesystem... >> Filling filesystem... >> Booting... INIT: version 2.84 booting Gentoo Linux; http://www.gentoo.org/ Copyright 2001-2004 Gentoo Technologies, Inc.; Distributed under the GPL * Mounting proc at /proc... [ ok ] * Starting devfsd...Started device management daemon v1.3.25 for /dev [ ok ] * Activating (possible) swap... [ ok ] * Remounting root filesystem read/write... [ ok ] * Setting hostname to livecd... [ ok ] * Mounting local filesystems... [ ok ] * Mounting USB device filesystem (usbfs)... [ ok ] * Activating (possibly) more swap... [ ok ] . . . Stage tarball(s), distfiles and packages can be found in /mnt/cdrom/. |
Let’s verify the date:
livecd root # date Fri Dec 31 12:58:09 GMT 2004 |
We will need some nice detailed info on the system config for the install, so let’s use dmesg:
livecd root # dmesg PROMLIB: Sun IEEE Boot Prom 3.11.2 1997/12/05 10:25 Linux version 2.4.27-sparc (root@ayanami) (gcc version 3.3.4 20040623 (Gentoo L4 ARCH: SUN4U Ethernet address: 08:00:20:9a:e6:79 On node 0 totalpages: 64878 zone(0): 65448 pages. zone(1): 0 pages. zone(2): 0 pages. Found CPU 0 (node=f006619c,mid=0) Found CPU 1 (node=f0066508,mid=1) Found 2 CPU prom device tree node(s). Kernel command line: root=/dev/ram0 init=/linuxrc looptype=normal loop=/livecd.t Calibrating delay loop... 591.46 BogoMIPS Memory: 512832k available (1968k kernel code, 688k data, 168k init) [fffff80000] Dentry cache hash table entries: 65536 (order: 7, 1048576 bytes) Inode cache hash table entries: 32768 (order: 6, 524288 bytes) Mount cache hash table entries: 512 (order: 0, 8192 bytes) Buffer cache hash table entries: 32768 (order: 5, 262144 bytes) Page-cache hash table entries: 65536 (order: 6, 524288 bytes) POSIX conformance testing by UNIFIX PCI: Probing for controllers. SYSIO: UPA portID 1f, at 000001fe00000000 sbus0: Clock 25.0 MHz dma0: HME DVMA gate array Sparc Zilog8530 serial driver version 1.68.2.2 Sun Mouse-Systems mouse driver version 1.00 tty00 at 0xf1100004 (irq = 12,7e8) is a Zilog8530 tty01 at 0xf1100000 (irq = 12,7e8) is a Zilog8530 tty02 at 0xf1000004 (irq = 12,7e8) is a Zilog8530 tty03 at 0xf1000000 (irq = 12,7e8) is a Zilog8530 keyboard: not present Console: ttyS0 (Zilog8530) Linux NET4.0 for Linux 2.4 Based upon Swansea University Computer Society NET3.039 Initializing RT netlink socket Starting kswapd devfs: v1.12c (20020818) Richard Gooch (rgooch@atnf.csiro.au) devfs: boot_options: 0x1 pty: 256 Unix98 ptys configured rtc_init: no PC rtc found Floppy drive(s): fd0 is 1.44M FDC 0 is a post-1991 82077 RAMDISK driver initialized: 16 RAM disks of 8192K size 1024 blocksize loop: loaded (max 8 devices) sunhme.c:v2.01 26/Mar/2002 David S. Miller (davem@redhat.com) eth0: HAPPY MEAL (SBUS) 10/100baseT Ethernet 08:00:20:9a:e6:79 Uniform Multi-Platform E-IDE driver Revision: 7.00beta4-2.4 ide: Assuming 50MHz system bus speed for PIO modes; override with idebus=xx SCSI subsystem driver Revision: 1.00 qlogicfc : PCI not present esp0: IRQ 4,7e0 SCSI ID 7 Clk 40MHz CCYC=25000 CCF=8 TOut 167 NCR53C9XF(espfast) ESP: Total of 1 ESP hosts found, 1 actually in use. scsi0 : Sparc ESP366-HME Vendor: IBM Model: DDRS34560SUN4.2G Rev: S98E Type: Direct-Access ANSI SCSI revision: 02 Vendor: IBM Model: DDRS34560SUN4.2G Rev: S98E Type: Direct-Access ANSI SCSI revision: 02 Vendor: TOSHIBA Model: XM5701TASUN12XCD Rev: 2395 Type: CD-ROM ANSI SCSI revision: 02 Vendor: FUJITSU Model: MAA3182S SUN18G Rev: 1907 Type: Direct-Access ANSI SCSI revision: 02 Vendor: FUJITSU Model: MAA3182S SUN18G Rev: 1907 Type: Direct-Access ANSI SCSI revision: 02 Vendor: FUJITSU Model: MAA3182S SUN18G Rev: 1907 Type: Direct-Access ANSI SCSI revision: 02 Vendor: FUJITSU Model: MAA3182S SUN18G Rev: 1907 Type: Direct-Access ANSI SCSI revision: 02 Attached scsi disk sda at scsi0, channel 0, id 0, lun 0 Attached scsi disk sdb at scsi0, channel 0, id 1, lun 0 Attached scsi disk sdc at scsi0, channel 0, id 9, lun 0 Attached scsi disk sdd at scsi0, channel 0, id 10, lun 0 Attached scsi disk sde at scsi0, channel 0, id 11, lun 0 Attached scsi disk sdf at scsi0, channel 0, id 12, lun 0 esp0: target 0 [period 100ns offset 15 20.00MHz FAST-WIDE SCSI-II] SCSI device sda: 8385121 512-byte hdwr sectors (4293 MB) Partition check: /dev/scsi/host0/bus0/target0/lun0: p1 p2 p3 p8 esp0: target 1 [period 100ns offset 15 20.00MHz FAST-WIDE SCSI-II] SCSI device sdb: 8385121 512-byte hdwr sectors (4293 MB) /dev/scsi/host0/bus0/target1/lun0: p3 p8 esp0: target 9 [period 100ns offset 15 20.00MHz FAST-WIDE SCSI-II] SCSI device sdc: 35378533 512-byte hdwr sectors (18114 MB) /dev/scsi/host0/bus0/target9/lun0: p1 p2 p3 esp0: target 10 [period 100ns offset 15 20.00MHz FAST-WIDE SCSI-II] SCSI device sdd: 35378533 512-byte hdwr sectors (18114 MB) esp0: target 11 [period 100ns offset 15 20.00MHz FAST-WIDE SCSI-II] SCSI device sde: 35378533 512-byte hdwr sectors (18114 MB) /dev/scsi/host0/bus0/target11/lun0: p1 p2 p3 esp0: target 12 [period 100ns offset 15 20.00MHz FAST-WIDE SCSI-II] SCSI device sdf: 35378533 512-byte hdwr sectors (18114 MB) /dev/scsi/host0/bus0/target12/lun0: p1 p2 p3 Attached scsi CD-ROM sr0 at scsi0, channel 0, id 6, lun 0 esp0: target 6 asynchronous sr0: scsi-1 drive Uniform CD-ROM driver Revision: 3.12 d7s: unable to locate device usb.c: registered new driver usbdevfs usb.c: registered new driver hub usb.c: registered new driver hiddev usb.c: registered new driver hid hid-core.c: v1.8.1 Andreas Gal, Vojtech Pavlik ojtech@suse.cz> hid-core.c: USB HID support drivers mice: PS/2 mouse device common for all mice Initializing Cryptographic API NET4: Linux TCP/IP 1.0 for NET4.0 IP Protocols: ICMP, UDP, TCP IP: routing cache hash table of 8192 buckets, 64Kbytes TCP: Hash tables configured (established 65536 bind 65536) NET4: Unix domain sockets 1.0/SMP for Linux NET4.0. RAMDISK: Compressed image found at block 0 Freeing initrd memory: 914k freed VFS: Mounted root (ext2 filesystem) readonly. Mounted devfs on /dev scsi singledevice 0 0 0 0 VFS: Can't find ext2 filesystem on dev sr(11,0). ISO 9660 Extensions: RRIP_1991A uhci.c: USB Universal Host Controller Interface driver v1.1 usb-uhci.c: $Revision: 1.275 $ time 13:52:44 Oct 29 2004 usb-uhci.c: High bandwidth mode enabled usb-uhci.c: v1.275:USB Universal Host Controller Interface driver eth0: Link is up using internal transceiver at 100Mb/s, Full Duplex. |
Look’s good. In the next installment of this article, we will create the filesystems.
There are 7 parts to this article:
Part 1 – Gentoo on SPARC – Booting the Install CD
Part 2 – Gentoo on SPARC – Creating the Filesystems
Part 3 – Gentoo on SPARC – Copying Initial System, Portage, and Distfiles
Part 4 – Gentoo on SPARC – Creating the Kernel
Part 5 – Gentoo on SPARC – Getting Silo Installed
Part 6 – Gentoo on SPARC – Initial Logon
Part 7 – Gentoo on SPARC – Final Configuration
