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Re: boot-floppies 3.0.21 for testing



"Thomas J. Zeeman" <tjzeeman@cs.vu.nl> writes:

> I've managed to install this U1 from floppies before. IIRC U1 and possibly
> U2 are the only type of Ultras not affected by the bug you mention.
> I've been told that from U5 and up booting from floppy isn't gonna work.
> If that's because of the bug or not, haven't got a clue.

It is a limitation in the firmware of the Ultra 5 line, possibly
ultra10 as well, not sure.

> Then again, the 3.0.21 isn't working either. The RAMfs is built into the
> kernel this time, but after changing the disk it freezes so hard it needs
> a power-cycle (Stop-A didn't work :( ). No drive activity after I've
> pressed enter to confirm the change of disk.

Hmm, not good at all.

> Just a screen with the nice logo of Tux with a sun on its belly and
> the kernel boot output.  (Just curious, but why does a
> sun-kernel-image have RTC enabled? Have they introduced these in
> very recent machines?)

No idea.

> The last two messages are:
> floppy0 WARNING disk change called too early
> and then a the message to put in the root-disk and press ENTER.
> 
> Doing that results in the mentioned freeze.

This looks like some sort of Sun4u kernel issue.  Can you be sure to
file a "serious" bug on the kernel?  Or maybe BenC already knows what
this is and is fixing it?

> Considering the U1s are esentially the only ultras even capable of booting
> from floppy and even that is troublesome - I've had to go through at least
> a dozen working (!) floppies to find one that would get accepted by the
> drive + OpenBootPROM - I don't know if it is even worth it to try to get
> this to work. Most other people seem quite content with having a
> choice of either a bootable cd or a tftp-boot.
> I'm willing to help out on this, but unforseen RL-happenings put my
> efforts on this matter on hold until at least next weekend. :(

I agree that this should get fixed for release.  There's no reason why
it shouldn't work, that is, unless it's a hardware/firmware issue
after all...

-- 
...Adam Di Carlo..<adam@onshore-devel.com>...<URL:http://www.onshored.com/>



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