Okay, so I go to school at the University of Vermont and I am a member
of a student organization the CSSA (Computer Science Students
Association). A couple of years back we had a few tips on a bunch of
computers that were going to be thrown out, so we decided to rescue
them. These were mostly Sun systems (11x Sunblade 100, 9x Ultra 5, 2x
Ultra 1, 1x Ultra 60, 1x Ultra 10, 1x SparcStation 20---32-bit). We
decided the best thing we could do with so many machines would be to
build a cluster of some sort. Of course, not all of these machines
work, but most of them do.
We installed Ubuntu 6.06 on all of the working Sun systems initially,
though I haven't gotten to the 32-bit SparcStation. The big issue of
installation was installing on machines where we lacked a working
compatible optical drive. That's when I learned how to netboot. I
successfully netbooted Ubuntu, but when entering the partitioning
step, the installer decided to stop working. So I tried Debian and the
installation was a success.
Meanwhile, there were also four SGI boxes (2xSGI Indy and 2x SGI Iris
Indigo) as well as one Digital AlphaStation 500 we rescued. I had
noticed on the Debian downloads page that all of these architectures
were supported, so I have spent the last couple of days trying to
install Debian on these machines (as well as an older version for the
SparcStation which esp fails in getting access to the hard drive).
Well, this email regards one of the SGI Indys. With the first SGI
Indy, now named Bell, I successfully installed Debian via netboot,
though the partitioning step of the installation was a bit tricky.
However, when netbooting the other SGI Indy, which will hopefully be
named Whistle upon successful installation, experienced a kernel panic
very shortly after downloading the netboot file (though it's much less
frustrating having something like this occur early in the installation
process).
The output was something along the lines of:
Checking for multiply shift/bug? bug present? yes. workaround present? no.
There might have been a line here but I forget what it was.
Kernel Panic!
Enable CPU_R4000_WORKAROUNDS to rectify.
A Google search of "CPU_R4000_WORKAROUNDS debian" (not in quotes)
returns one page of results referring to mostly if not all debian
kernel image configuration files.
It was suggested to me on the Debian support IRC channel that I might
email debian-kernel-list to notify of the problem and to seek feedback.
In any case, the CPU_R4000_WORKAROUNDS flag is referred to in two
sections of all of the Google search results (which are pretty much
all some file called Kconfig):
"config MACH_DECSTATION" and "config CPU_R4000_WORKAROUNDS"
However, it isn't referred to in the "config SGI_IP22" section. This
machine, meanwhile, is detected as SGI_IP22 by the bootloader.
In any case, I look forward to hearing a response. I would be
extremely pleased to get as many of these machines running as possible
using a Debian-based Linux distro rather than having to resort to
NetBSD like I will be for the SparcStation.
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