Re: Has anyone ever got Debian to install on an SGI Altix?
On Mon, Aug 29, 2005 at 07:04:54PM -0600, dann frazier wrote:
| On Fri, 2005-08-26 at 16:55 +0100, Tim Cutts wrote:
| > I've been looking into trying to install Debian on an SGI Altix (in
| > this case, a really baby Altix - one of the new Altix 330 machines).
| >
| > I realise this is probably a forlorn hope, but we'd like to see just
| > how difficult it is. With most of the SGI-specific stuff now in the
| > upstream kernel sources, it seems not beyond the realms of possibility.
|
| Actually I tried to get this working on an Altix by ending debug d-i
| drops to Jesse Barnes a while back. I determined that reading/writing
| from /dev/console started to silently fail once busybox init started -
| anytime before it worked fine. The standard debian kernel seemed to
| work in his Fedora userspace, it was seemingly just a d-i issue.
| Unfortunately, the debug cycle was too high latency so I never finished
| it.
This may still be happening. About a month ago, I tried booting one of
the daily builds on an Altix:
http://cdimage.debian.org/pub/cdimage-testing/daily/ia64/
and it failed about there. I didn't have time to debug it at the time,
so I just did a minimal install on an HP box, then rsynced the root
over. Interestingly enough, altix works fine with the standard 2.6.12
debian kernel.
| Its good to hear that d-i can work with the right kernel. I'd love to
| know when standard Debian kernels aren't working, especially if someone
| can tell me what's wrong (or give me access to a box remotely to fix
| it).
I'll try to dig into this today and see if I can isolate what's going
on.
| Once Altix was known to work, my plan is to add an option to the elilo
| graphical menu for an Altix console that will automatically append the
| proper console option.
Another thing that would be really helpful is to turn on the
"relocatable" option by default in the installer elilo.conf (and the
system copy once in place). Altix requires elilo to use
relocatable support.
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