Re: PowerMac 7500 with MAXpowrMP booting 2.4.20 in MP mode - some trouble
On Tue, Dec 10, 2002 at 20:52:01 -0500, Derrik Pates composed:
> Hey, finally got myself another PowerPC to play with - it's an old
> PowerMac 7500 with a dual-604e processor card. It works pretty well -
> I've succeeded in getting a working Debian install on it - but I've got
> a few issues.
>
> First, I've discovered that it doesn't need MacOS, and that quik will
> work for multiprocessor booting. Well, most of the time - as long as I
yeh, booting natively in linux is really cool. the 7500 is one of those
that can. for some reason a lot pf ppl have problems with the beige G3s
- they need quik too, but have obscure settings they need to boot from
quik.
> cold boot the machine. (It's a PowerMac 7500 with 176 MB of RAM and a
> MAXpowr MP processor board from NewerTech - I got it for free from a
> coworker.) If I boot a uniprocessor kernel, it always boots fine; if I
> boot an SMP kernel, it'll come up right, as long as I boot the system
> cold. If I reboot the system, on the next boot when one of the init
> scripts tries to get the time from the CUDA RTC, it hangs. Sometimes it
> hangs with the message 'cuda: state=awaiting_reply, status=[something]'.
> I can't remember what, and it only gets that message out occasionally
> before seizing the machine up hard - even Ctrl-Cmd-Power won't reboot
> it, only the power button will have an effect.
>
> Second, this system has a Voodoo3 PCI with a Mac OF ROM on it.
> Unfortunately, if I don't use BootX to boot Linux, the card doesn't get
> sufficiently initialized, and so using the tdfxfb driver doesn't work at
> all - the video is too screwed up to read. (It's trying - just not
> succeeding.) OFFB does work, but it's kinda sluggish.
did u try setting a vid mode in /etc/quik.conf?
> Third, the nvramrc is fairly large, apparently taking up most of the
> space in the NVRAM, so setting the 'boot-file' parameter for quik to
> autoboot doesn't work - OF says "string too long", nvsetenv in Linux
> just segfaults. Any alternate possibilities for me? It seems to mostly
> ignore what I've told it in quik.conf, other than when installing the
> bootblock.
setting boot-file doesn't work usually, not for me (a single CPU 604e
7500) anyway. boot-command is ok, and boot-device, too. boot-file is
rarely if ever needed. check the nvramrc - does it have like two to 3
pages of Forth code? then u have a patch in there - usually to sync
video, disk (?), and OF properly (it has issues with the disk and OF syncing
like the 7200 does, but on the 7500 can get an OF console on the box - no
need for a serial cable). what u could do if u really want to have that
boot-file arg. is zap OF (cmd-opt-O-F), but the video sync is going to
be annoying - u have to hit and hold down cmd-ctrl-power a couple
of times to get the OF console to show up properly.
to make sure that quik writes to the bootblock, run quik -vf (force,
verbose).
simon/
> --
> Derrik Pates
> dpates@dsdk12.net
> dpates@voxel.net
>
>
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