On Tue, May 2, 2023, at 9:01 AM, Paul de Weerd wrote:
> Thanks for your reply! I tried the 32GB CF on my net5501-70 as well
> and that didn't even POST, so that hardware really is stuck with
> smaller storage (probably <8GB, my hunch is that this is somehow
> related to LBA48).
>
> But the ALIX definitely works. After some off-list discussion and
> suggestions, I installed 6.6 and that worked just fine. Then I could
> upgrade that with sysupgrade(8) (thank you, sysupgrade authors!) to
> 6.7, 6.8, 6.9, 7.0, 7.1, 7.2 (which didn't work when I tried to
> install it), 7.3 (same) and then the latest snapshot. I now have:
>
> [weerd@twix] $ sysctl kern.version hw.model
> kern.version=OpenBSD 7.3-current (GENERIC) #692: Sun Apr 30 17:36:48 MDT 2023
> dera...@i386.openbsd.org:/usr/src/sys/arch/i386/compile/GENERIC
>
> hw.model=Geode(TM) Integrated Processor by AMD PCS ("AuthenticAMD" 586-class)
>
> And it's working very well. I do note that 6.6 still defaulted to
> FFS1 for /, so that may have something to do with it. There were also
> some commits to the i386 biosboot (see
> http://cvsweb.openbsd.org/src/sys/arch/i386/stand/biosboot/biosboot.S
> for more details) that may be related. I have another ALIX and a
> spare 32G CF card, so I'll play around a bit more with those, to see
> if I can find some more details. If anyone has suggestions on things
> to try, I'm eager to hear them!
>
> In summary - the ALIX *DOES* work with 'largish' (for the hardware
> vintage) storage - it just takes some effort.
>
FWIW, I'm running 7.3 on an alix2c3 with a 32 GB card
(https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00ECEVEP0/) and FFS2 without any upgrade
dance:
$ dmesg|grep ^wd0
wd0 at pciide0 channel 0 drive 0: <SDCFXPS-032G>
wd0: 1-sector PIO, LBA48, 30535MB, 62537328 sectors
wd0(pciide0:0:0): using PIO mode 4, Ultra-DMA mode 4
I can't speak to the issue you ran into, though, other than remembering that I
have both UDMA and LBA enabled in the (latest) BIOS. I assume sysupgrade would
update the bootloader with each release in the same way that booting bsd.rd and
running an install/upgrade does.
Brian Conway
RCE Software, LLC
