Sun fire V890 UltraSparc server kernel panic, offer to assist with fixing it and future ports
Hi
I recently came across a Sun Fire V890 server in a junkyard, which is now sitting in a room in my house.
The machine has 32GBs of RAM, 6x146GB 10krpm drives on a FC-AL system and 8 dual core UltraSparc IV+ processors. It's a fairly large piece of equipment and sounds like a jet turbine starting up when you turn it on. It also produces a lot of heat and eats a lot of power... but I don't mind, it's cool having a server lying around. It's also fun when friends call and they ask if I'm driving :P .
This is the first time I've ever come into contact with Sun hardware, it's also the first time I've ever e-mailed a mailing list. The machine does not have a framebuffer/graphics card installed, although I have ordered one.
After a painful learning exercise in building a serial cable (the manual says Null modem cable but it's in fact a straight cable that works) and even more pain in waiting 24 minutes each time the machine boots into diagnostics mode, I've managed to set all io to ttya (it was set to rsc) and reduce the level of diagnostics to speed up diagnostics mode boot time.
I managed to get Solaris 10 installed on the machine, as well as Webmin and a few other bits and pieces. I really don't like Solaris, for many reasons. I would really really really like to get Debian onto this machine. In fact, I'm probably not going to use it for anything until I get Debian onto it... even if that means months of waiting.
So far, no luck installing Debian on this machine. The machine boots to the SILO bootloader. If I enter :
"install"
at the boot: prompt... the install runs until it gets to something along the lines of "handing over from earlyprom0 to ttys0". I figured it's just sending the output to the wrong device. So I retried the installation with these arguments at the boot prompt :
"install console=ttya DEBIAN_FRONTEND=text"
The result is output past the console handover phase, but then a kernel panic occurs. The just of the panic is "[ 135.128627] Kernel unaligned access at TPC[46d24c] notifier_chain_register+0x10/0x38". Note that "console=earlyprom0" results in identical output.
The error has been reported as bug 509202.
The main point of this e-mail is, it'd be really great if someone could help me. I am more than happy to participate in testing possible solutions. If access to the current installation of Solaris 10 on the machine will help, I can organise that too. Just let me know what you need and I'll do my best to assist. I'm also happy to assist with future ports and testing.
Thanks for your time :)
Aaron
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