[Solved] Re: Slink bootdisks on an MCA machine (PS/2 9595) (fwd)

[Jor-el <jorel@ibm.net>]

Adam,

	Thanks to people on an IBM internal Linux forum my issue was
resolved.

	It turns out that there is a patch for an fdiv test for the
pentium floating around, and this patch has already been incorporated into
the Debian kernel (though not for the stock kernel in 2.0.x). This patch
is activated by the boot flag 'mca-pentium'.

	So to summarize what I found for MCA machines and Debian : normal
bootup for all machines other than the model 9595. For the model 9595, the
boot parameters of 'no-hlt' and 'mca-pentium' need to be supplied.

	Note that this patch has made its way into the stock kernel in
2.2.6.

Regards,
Jor-el

PS. One of my 9595 machines has hardware RAID on it (an IBM controller).
That machine booted up fine but could not recognize any harddrives. You
wouldnt happen to know whether hardware RAID is supported for this
controller, would you?

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Sun, 25 Apr 1999 11:50:25 -0500 (CDT)
From: Jor-el <jorel@ibm.net>
To: Adam Di Carlo <adam@onshore.com>
Cc: debian-boot@lists.debian.org
Subject: Re: Slink bootdisks on an MCA machine (PS/2 9595)
Resent-Date: 25 Apr 1999 16:53:31 -0000
Resent-From: debian-boot@lists.debian.org
Resent-cc: recipient list not shown: ;



On 18 Apr 1999, Adam Di Carlo wrote:

> Jor-el <jorel@ibm.net> writes:
>  
> > 	Someone who saw my post responded to me saying that if I used the
> > <Ctrl>-<ScrollLock> combination, I would be able to see what was the
> > actual process that was hanging. I tried this, and a lot of other key
> > combinations that I could think of, with nary a response. Whereupon, the
> > correspondant suggested that the kernel itself is hanging.
> > 
> > 	What do you suggest I do? I would have filed a bug ordinarily, but
> > I'm pretty sure that you guys who are the ones actively building boot
> > disks dont have access to such a machine, and hence, might not be able to
> > debug it. 
> 
> What is the symptoms?  It simply hangs after loading the root
> filesystem RAMDISK ?  Are you sure it's not bad ram or some such?
> 

	Sigh! I wish it were only RAM or some such thing, but it isnt. I
have another machine of the same model, and it displayed the same
symptoms. The symptom, in this case, was hanging after displaying the
'Starting kswapd' message.

	I also have access to a model 8595, which is a PS/2 MCA machine
(earlier model than the 9595), and the debian boot disks work fine on it.
So the problem appears to be limited to this specific model.

	Since the real-time clock gets activated right after kswapd, I
speculated that maybe this was what was causing the problem. However, even
after I built a bootdisk with the real-time clock disabled, it still
failed to work.

	I guess I shall try and see if anyone on th linux-mca list can
help me.

Jor-el


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