Re: debian-hppa on a C8000
On 2019-03-15 8:36 a.m., Helge Deller wrote:
> On 15.03.19 10:17, Lothar Paltins wrote:
>> I've tried to send a reply to the list with an attachment, but it seems,
>> that it was silently ignored. I'm now sending it without the attachment.
>>
>> Am 14.03.19 um 00:17 schrieb John David Anglin:
>>> Helge is right. Unless you are a ATI graphics card expert, you
>>> won't be able to fix the ring test failure.
>> I don't want to fix it, although my profession as a software engineer
>> was the development and debugging of hardware control software. But I'm
>> not an ATI graphics card expert and I think the graphics acceleration
>> isn't very important. I don't want to do real work on this more than 13
>> years old machine. It's slow compared to current machines and it
>> consumes almost 300W of electrical power without any load. All of my HP
>> workstations are just museum pieces and to be authentic, all of them are
>> running HP-UX, except for this one C8000.
>>
>> But anyway, it's interesting to see that an almost current Linux runs on
>> it.
Linux 5.0.1-1~exp1 is available in experimental.
> The very newest Linux (git head, Debian unstable, ...) runs on it,
> most times better than older ones.
You are correct about the hardware. However, I might suggest that there are other reasons
to play with old hardware. You can learn a lot about the internals of linux and open source
software development in general with old hardware. Development on the major release
architectures is dominated by commercial interests. You have to have a narrow focus to
make a contribution to these architectures.
>
>> But it seems to be a little bit fragile. I booted it today and all
>> messages on the serial console seemed to be correct, but the connected
>> monitor didn't show the KDE login screen, neither via the DVI nor the
>> VGA connector. I tried to log in blindly and this worked, but the
>> desktop was displayed only on the VGA connector. I logged out from the
>> session and logged in again, but then the system freezes up after the
>> desktop background was drawn.
> I'm astonished that you got some graphical output at all.
> But in fact, nobody really tests C8000 with graphics card.
> All c8000 machines I own run "server-like" in the datacenter.
Same here.
>
>> I had to switch it off and after powering it up again it crashed
>> during the next booting. But eventually, after booting the machine a
>> third time, everything works again as before.
> Of course that's not how it should be. I assume this is based on the fact
> that you used graphics before.
>
>> There are only a lot of "unaligned access" messages on the console
>> coming from KDE applications, but I guess, that's a known issue.
> Yes, they are non-critical and just show that applications don't
> respect the natural alignments of data.
The PA-RISC architecture requires accesses to be strictly aligned and unaligned accesses
are fixed in the kernel. On x86, etc, unaligned accesses work but there is a performance
hit relative to accesses that respect the natural alignment of data. So, these messages
reflect application bugs that should be fixed...
>
>> I've taken a photo of the console with the backtrace after the crash,
>> but it doesn't seem to be possible to send a mail with an attachment. If
>> anybody is interested, I could send it directly.
> You can send me everything in private mail.
Kernel related mail should generally be sent to <linux-parisc@vger.kernel.org>.
Dave
--
John David Anglin dave.anglin@bell.net
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