On Sat, Feb 25, 2006 at 11:38:55PM +0800, Tomasz Grzegurzko wrote: > Hi Sven, > > I've been trying to coax the floppy images from > http://people.debian.org/~luther/d-i/images/daily/powerpc/floppy/ > (where daily = 25/2/2006) to boot on a 7200/75 I've picked up. The > system boots of the disks fine, which many of the earlier revisions of > the images do not (the ones pointed to by the debian documentation only > contain seemingly empty disk images, weird). Other times, I've inserted > the boot disk and after loading it up the screen blanks and will not > switch back on. However, my issue with the daily set from above is the > floppy module. It seems that the module "floppy" will not load either > from the installer or via a modprobe. > > # depmod -a > # modprobe floppy > FATAL: Error inserting floppy > (/lib/modules/2.6.15-1-powerpc-miboot/kernel/drivers/block/floppy.ko): > Device or resource busy > # dmesg | tail > register_blkdev: cannot get major 2 for fd
Ok, we need to investigate this, i am at fosdem, where i picked up a prep box and another oldworld, and will be back home only wednesday and probably not have time until next WE, but i will definitively try a run of those. > Now I've tried an earlier set of disks based around > /~luther/d-i/images/2005-11-09 > and they do not exhibit this floppy problem, but I cannot get through > the installation as the kernel modules for critical things such as the > ext2 file system cannot be loaded from archives as they do not exist in > the repos for stable, testing or unstable anymore. Ok. This means that something broke in the kernel bewteen both. do the 2005.11.09 have 2.6.14 kernels, right ? > The unit has 40MB of ram and I am told that the system is going to > operate in lowmem mode, which seems to affect very little. I've checked > free at repeated points throughout and always seen ~20MB of ram free. > The ethernet and scsi modules are mace and mac53c94, which work out of > the older 2005-11-09 disk set but I cannot test under this later disk > set as I can't load the modules from the floppys I've made! > > Also, throughout the process I've tried various other disk sets and > notice from time to time a particular disk may break the 1.44MB barrier, Sure, but this should be fixed now. We had a serious problem about this. > can I safely interpret that these are problematic disk sets and should > be avoided? I've tried to dd these disks and (as expected) run out of Yes, they will not work at all. > space on the target disk when using /dev/fd0 (will superformatted > floppies work on this old mac -- unknown, but I am guessing these disks > have some kinds of errors perhaps?). I believe not. > Sorry to contact you direct if the right thing to do was post on a list; The list would have been the better place, i will CC this there. > I'm happy for this to be repeated on whatever appropriate list for > others to muse over. I should also mention it's entirely possible I've > overlooked something fundamental as I will admit I only have limited > experience in both PPC architecture and Linux/MacOS on PPC architecture, > so messing around with the openrom firmware is something I've avoided > doing, but perhaps this is why the process is all going pear shaped, > although the fact that some disk sets work tends to dismiss this. No, the powerpc oldworld miboot floppies have not worked since a long time, and are a bit raw right now, so there is work needed to make them clean again. I am happy to see you participating in that quest. You should also file bug report for individual issues, the above should probably be filled against linux-2.6, i think. Friendly, Sven LUther -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
