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Fwd: Re: 810LMR LinuxBIOS setup
by Antony Stone 22 Oct '02

22 Oct '02

On Tuesday 22 October 2002 11:05 am, James Alton wrote: > Hello everyone, > > I'm new to this list, so let me explain where I'm at. I just visited the > LinuxBIOS page and noticed it had 810LR (810L now?) support and a nice > HOWTO-ish sort of document. I was looking at the type of Disk on Chip to > use. In the 810LR document, he says to use an MD-2800-D08, and later > says that a MD-2802 will work as it's the newer version of a practically > identical chip. I am wondering anyone has gotten the MD-2810-D08 working > with LinuxBIOS and if there is any reason it shouldn't? > > P.S. the MD-2810 is about $10 cheaper per chip, this is why I am asking > if there are any important differences. MD-2810 is a TSOP - Thin Small Outline Package - which is a surface-mount device, therefore it's electrically identical to MD-2800 but physically it won't fit in your Bios socket.... Antony. -- There are only 10 types of people in the world: those who understand binary notation, and those who don't.

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810LMR LinuxBIOS setup
by James Alton 22 Oct '02

22 Oct '02

Hello everyone, I'm new to this list, so let me explain where I'm at. I just visited the LinuxBIOS page and noticed it had 810LR (810L now?) support and a nice HOWTO-ish sort of document. I was looking at the type of Disk on Chip to use. In the 810LR document, he says to use an MD-2800-D08, and later says that a MD-2802 will work as it's the newer version of a practically identical chip. I am wondering anyone has gotten the MD-2810-D08 working with LinuxBIOS and if there is any reason it shouldn't? (The specs look very similar for MD-2802 and MD-2810) I looked the the http://www.m-sys.com/ website under the DiskOnChip Millenium and it seems like the MD-2810 should work... P.S. the MD-2810 is about $10 cheaper per chip, this is why I am asking if there are any important differences. James Alton jalton(a)olsh.cx

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Re: LinuxBIOS
by Antony Stone 22 Oct '02

22 Oct '02

On Tuesday 22 October 2002 2:56 am, Mark Weinstein wrote: > Antony, > > Can you help me? I was reading your FAQ about the LinuxBIOS installation > and had a few questions. Bear with me here... I am new to the whole > LinuxBIOS thing and am having a hard time trying to find answers. Hi Mark. I see you asked Eric much the same questions, which have been discussed on the list overnight, however here are my answers to your questions, since I'm sure I too have a slightly different perspective than both Eric and Ron... > 1) I use Linux boxes in a clustering environment and would LOVE to have > the nodes boot themselves without having to load images from the network, > etc. Is this doable? You can certainly boot the kernel image from DoC for example, and you can then pick up your root file system from local HD, local Flash IDE, or the network. However, what's your reason for not wanting to load the images across the network ? If it's speed or performance, I think you might be surprised how well something like etherboot can do... > 2) I use a RedHat 2.4.18 based kernel with quite a few kernel mods. How > much space is on the DOC (is it 8mb?) and will the OS fit on it? Yes, the DoC I used is 8 megabytes - you typically need under 1 megabyte for the kernel image, so if you can fit the rest of your root fs into 7 megabytes you can build a totally self-contained (ie embedded) system. I doubt this is the best way of setting up a cluster though ? > 3) If the answer to #2 is yes, then can you reflash the chips from a > server or some other machine and then have them reboot without taking the > machines apart each time? Yes, the fact that you programmed the DoC on the target motherboard in the first place means you could do it again once the system is running if you wanted to. Just bear in mind that if you get it wrong, you have a dead machine until you open it up and swap the Bios chip back in to reprogram your DoC with something known to work. Changing the contents of the root fs on any sort of flash device is about as likely as reformatting and reinstalling your hard drive after booting from it and mounting it, though. > 4) If you can boot the OS from the chip, how do you have access to all of > your libraries, etc? Would you simply mount SOME file shares with > libraries and apps via NFS? You have three choices in effect: 1) Local flash "disk" storage - expensive and slow but it sounds cool 2) Local real disk storage - cheaper than flash, gets hotter and needs more power, but standard and plenty big enough 3) Remote mount across a network - no extra cost per node at all, shouldn't cause too much bandwidth problem depending on what applications you end up running, however don't just go for NFS because you've heard of it - it's really not that efficient - there are better network filing systems out there, but it's debatable whether there are any good ones :-) Take a look at something like Tom's Root Boot to see how it's possible to create a workable system in a very small space. > I am VERY interested in building some servers with LinuxBIOS, but I am also > very confused. :) Any help you can give me would be GREATLY appreciated! Okay, now I'll tell you my interest in LinuxBios, whihc might help to put some of my comments in perspective. I'm not (professionally) interested in clusters. I intend to play with clustering as a hobby someday, but for now I want to use LinuxBios: a) for security, to prevent anyone from being able to boot a machine from floppy disk or CD Rom when I'm not looking b) for speed, to get from power-on to login prompt (well, actually to NIC up and services running) as fast as possible c) for novelty, so that when somebody switches one of my machines on it doesn't look like a standard PC about to boot Windows - it's obviously something different from the word go d) (possibly) for cost - I have a particular application in mind which doesn't require much on the root fs, and I think it will fit into 7Mbytes on a DoC, so I may be able to build a useful "appliance"-type device without HDD at all Hope this helps, Antony. -- The difference between theory and practice is that in theory there is no difference, whereas in practice there is.

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Re: LinuxBIOS Questions.....
by ebiederman＠lnxi.com 21 Oct '02

21 Oct '02

Mark Weinstein <mark(a)dotcomlive.net> writes: > Eric, > > Can you help me? I was reading an article about the LinuxBIOS and had a few > questions. Your name was at the bottom of the article, so I thought I would > drop you a line. I hope you don¹t mind and if you do, please disregard this > message. :) Bear with me here... I am new to the whole LinuxBIOS thing and > am having a hard time trying to find answers. Asking on the LinuxBIOS list is probably the best way, questions and some answers forwarded there. > 1) I use Linux boxes in a clustering environment and would LOVE to have the > nodes boot themselves without having to load images from the network, etc. > Is this doable? Personally I think booting from a local hard driver is a less manageable way to do things. I have booted a 1000 node cluster over the network in under a minute. But there is support for booting from a hard drive. > 2) I use a RedHat 2.4.18 based kernel with quite a few kernel mods. How > much space is on the DOC (is it 8mb?) and will the OS fit on it? The DOC has 8MByte of space, yes. I don't use it and I don't see the need you can load a kernel from other places. And in fact I consider it a poor choice for any but an embedded user to hard code their kernel, into the ROM. > 3) If the answer to #2 is yes, then can you reflash the chips from a server > or some other machine and then have them reboot without taking the machines > apart each time? Yes. Though I try and keep reflashing down to just BIOS upgrades and not kernel upgrades. > 4) If you can coot the OS from he chip, how do you have access to all of > your libraries, etc? Would you simply mount SOME file shares with libraries > and apps via NFS? > > I am VERY interested in building some servers with LinuxBIOS, but I am also > very confused. :) Any help you can give me would be GREATLY > appreciated! Talk to the other people on the list. I have provided the answers I can, but you are coming from an extremely different perspective than I am. Eric

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Re: LinuxBIOS Questions.....
by ebiederman＠lnxi.com 21 Oct '02

21 Oct '02

Mark Weinstein <mark(a)dotcomlive.net> writes: > Eric, > > Thanks for the replies. I must no have made my intentions clear. I > actually do NOT want to boot from a local hard drive, but I wasn¹t sure if > the network boot would be way to taxing on the network. I will be using a > 100MB switched network and I didn¹t know how much bandwidth it would take to > remote boot the nodes. On top of that, what about any swap space that might > be needed? Note, while I reply to people when I am in a friendly mood, many times I too busy to talk to people, so please talk to the list. With multicast booting the scalability is fine. I actually would have booted faster if the cisco switches had not been in slow port mode delaying the inferface boot speed by 30 seconds or so. As for swap if you are seriously using that on a compute cluster you have problems. Although a little swapping to throw unused programs out is o.k. If your main filesystem is on NFS you probably have problems unless you have a small cluster. At the moment there is not a mature general purpose solution to the bandwidth limitation problems. But it depends a lot on your application, and your NFS servers where you see limitations, or which of the partial solutions are right for you. Eric

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GCC 3.2 ABI changes
by Ronald G Minnich 21 Oct '02

21 Oct '02

OK, it turns out one change involves structure packing. I'm not sure of the others, but I have confirmed that 3.2 will not build a working linuxbios and 2.96 will (on Redhat 8.0). The problems are in the MP table creation and/or parsing. ron

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A question on mptable and irq table
by Ronald G Minnich 21 Oct '02

21 Oct '02

It seems to me if you have an MP table you should not have an IRQ table, is this right or am I nuts. Do you really need both? ron

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freebios.org redirect is DOWN
by David Barr 21 Oct '02

21 Oct '02

As of 18:38 CST, the redirect from freebios.org to http://www.acl.lanl.gov/linuxbios/ is DOWN. Do I know what happened? Nope. Do you? -dBarr.

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m810clmr (SiS730S) Plan Of Attack
by David Barr 21 Oct '02

21 Oct '02

I want my uni to do something non-MS based, so I've opted to try and win them over to a fully open source solution. Eventually I'd like to have a small (5 nodes or so) system to benchmark various clustering setups on (openMOSIX, Scyld, SCORE, OSCAR, clustermatic, etc.), but first I have to show them it can be done. My goal then is to impress the Computer Science Faculty and Staff with an inexpensive, fast-booting, stable, speedy Linux wundernode; and then present a "Fund Me for a Few More Penguins" speech which will cause them to loosen the purse strings. Maybe if they'd stop buying extra copies of Exchange Server... but I digress. At any rate, even if I 'fail', I still have a really cool toy, and a lot of valuable experience. Here's my List of Things to Acquire(TM): 0) pcchips m810clmr (SiS730S) w/ Duron 1.2 ($77) 1) 1GB PC 133 RAM ($25/ea. 512MB; $50 total) 2) DiskOnChip MD-2008-D08 ($25) 3) MATX Case ($19) 4) IDE2CF Adapter ($21?) 5) CF Media ($40 - $???) 6) Optional HDD (ca. $50) All told, I'm looking at about $USD 300 per node, which is in my opinion quite reasonable. So what am I waiting for? Why, someone to poke obvious holes in my hastily conceived plan, of course. Good questions to answer would be: - Did I overlook some incredibly obvious component / requirement? - Can I do the three-step (DOC -> CF -> HDD) boot? - Should I avoid a particular brand of CF Media? - What size CF should I aim for? - Do you have a sample of a pcchips m810lmr config lying around? - Is my cost analysis fairly complete and realistic? Some of these questions are inane enough that they may not warrant flooding the whole list with responses. Direct replies ( david.barr (at) student.oc.edu ) are welcome, especially if you've done time on the SiS730S. -dbarr. PS: Apologies for the ugliness of my previous post to the list: that'll teach me to send mail from lab computers during class.

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more gcc
by Ronald G Minnich 21 Oct '02

21 Oct '02

gcc ... -o mptable.o /home/rminnich/src/linuxbios-p4dpr-1.0.0.8/freebios/src/mainboard/supermicro/p4dpe/mptable.c /home/rminnich/src/linuxbios-p4dpr-1.0.0.8/freebios/src/mainboard/supermicro/p4dpe/mptable.c:106:22: warning: multi-line string literals are deprecated I wonder how much code I've seen in the last while (Emacs for example) that uses this one. I just can't keep up with these improvements. :-) ron

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