woody installation in a PowerEdge 7150
Hello,
I am a newbie using Debian on SMP ia-64 servers and would like to
share my experience, which was sucessful but gave me some problems which
I solved but I still do not know exactly how.
I have installed Debian 3.0 in a PowerEdge 7150 (4 itanium
processors) using the ISO image for the first non-US CD of the IA-64
arquitecture. This image uses kernel 2.4.17. The PE 7150 we use does
not have RAID but two SCSI disks. The first installation trial was not
succesfull, it crashed with a
"... kernel panic, could not allocate IO TLB 2048" message
when accessing the network card (eepro100 driver).
My first contact with the PE and the Debian Installation procedure ended
by myself deleting, by error the only partition the disk came with,
a FAT 100 Mb partition, with flags lba, boot. Later I discovered that I
needed that partition to place the linux image so that the computer boots.
To summarize this is what I did (summing up several trials):
Powered on the PE with the first woody CD in the CD-ROM. When the EFI
bootloader showed the two possibilites to boot, (floppy or CD-ROM), chose
CD-ROM. The PE began to boot from the CD. As soon as ELILO appeared in the
screen I pressed the spacebar to get an ELILO prompt. I typed in:
linux swiotlb=32768
and proceeded with the normal Debian installation. If you do not append this
parameter, as soon as you use the eepro100 driver for the network card
the kernel will crash.
When partitioning the disk, I used parted. There is a possibilty to use
cfdisk, but I had some problems when I created a FAT 32 partition with it. I
made a first partition, type FAT, size 100 Mb approx. The PE needs the
FAT partition to boot from it. At the end of the installation ELILO will
place the vmlinuz there.
I do not know why but when creating the swap partition at the end
of the disk it took a lot of time. In some cases at the end of the
process parted gave me an error (I cannot remember the exact message)
and when quiting I was redirected to cfdisk, from which I recreated 2
ext3 and 1 swap partition. I really do not know what was wrong here. I can
only say that FAT was created with parted and the linux partitions with
cfdisk.
After that the installation proceeded smoothly and finished well. The
EFI bootloader showed a third boot option called "Debian Gnu/Linux" which
allows to boot from the diski and which was placed first in the boot order.
Now I have some problems with the ethernet card, because every 10,
15 minutes the network stops working. I have not looked at the log yet to
obtain more information on this problem. To resume network operations I have to
type in:
/etc/init.d/networking restart.
Does anybody have comments on how to overcome this last problem? is there
a newer kernel (2.4.20) for IA64 as a woody Debian package?. Would that
version work better for the eepro100 driver?.
thanks in advance,
Pablo de Vicente.
Reply to: