Re: linux for HP 9000 300/400 series
On Thu, Aug 03, 2000 at 04:11:19PM -0500, Rodney Schuler wrote:
> Great! One more person to join in the fun of rescuing these cool old
> machines. I love the way they are built - 14 gauge sheet metal over a 3/16
> inch welded steel frame. My chiropractor loves them also - especially when
> I move the 21" monitors :)
I'm a bit behind on this list. Re: the above -- me too. I have
a 382 here with 16Mb RAM and 420Mb SCSI disk. I posted a couple of
months ago asking about Linux-m68k support for it on this list and
there didn't seem to be much happening then.
> The NetBSD guys seem to think that the net boot process is the easiest.
> They were the first outside of HP to be able to boot an HP9000. They used
> the over the network method. The process is supposed to go something like
> this:
Yep, that's all correct. I have NetBSD installed here, installed via
the LAN.
> 1) Set up another computer to be the boot server.
> 1a) This machine needs to be running the rbootd daemon.
> 1b) The rboot protocol is pure ethernet - no IP stuff.
> 1c) The boot server needs to be on the same ethernet as the HP9000 to be
> booted up (no gateways between)
The machine's ROM uses rbootd to get kernel information. Usually you
use it to boot NetBSD's SYS_INST or SYS_UBOOT. Then the kernel will
use rarp to get an IP address, and rpc.bootparamd to get its root file
system path (for NFS mount).
> Peter Maydell (pmaydell@chiark.greenend.org.uk) claims to have a working
> linux rbootd (http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~pmaydell/hp/index.html).
Yep, it works fine. There's a Debian package, which I run on debian i386.
Actually, I want to reinstall NetBSD to run diskless. Unfortunately
I can't due to what appears to be a NetBSD kernel bug. My netmask
here is 255.255.255.128. Here's what happens (from memory):
1. ROM loads SYS_UBOOT using rbootd;
2. SYS_UBOOT obtains IP using rarp, with correct netmask 255.255.255.128;
3. SYS_UBOOT obtains correct NFS root using rpc.bootparamd;
4. SYS_UBOOT loads kernel over NFS.
5. Kernel obtains IP using rarp, with incorrect netmask 255.255.255.0;
6. Kernel sends rpc.bootparamd messages to get its NFS root, but sends
them to the wrong broadcast address since it got the netmask wrong.
Not too good. The NetBSD folks I asked about it suggested it was a bug
in the hp300 port, but it sounds like platform-independent code to me.
I wasn't inspired enough to debug it; if it had been the Linux kernel
I might have been.
regards
Hamish
--
Hamish Moffatt VK3SB <hamish@debian.org> <hamish@cloud.net.au>
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