Re: [LinuxBIOS] Is this system supported? SUN FIRE X4100

[Lu, Yinghai]

What OS are you going to use?

Things to be checked
1. settings for to make management card working
2. Is the LSI FW on BIOS flash or another separate flash?
3. Boot from SAS raid directly? We may need to use big IDE flash for using tiny kernel and kexec...

YH

-----Original Message-----
From: [e-mail] [mailto:[e-mail]] On Behalf Of Frank Rust
Sent: Monday, April 10, 2006 12:42 AM
To: [e-mail]
Subject: [LinuxBIOS] Is this system supported? SUN FIRE X4100

Is this one supported, or might become supported soon?
System SUN FIRE X4100

Mainboard manufacturer: (SUN?)
Processor: one or two Opteron or Opteron Dual Core
Chipset: AMD 8131, AMD 8111
IO: quad channel SAS raid (LSI SAS 1064)
Net: 2 dual 10/100/1000 Ethernet Controllers (Intel FW82546 GB NIC)
Video: ATI Rage XL
Floppy Disc, legacy Serial: SMSC LPC47B272 Super IO Controller
(additional: Management: Motorola MPC8248PowerPC Processor)

Supported OS: Solaris 10 x64, RedHat Enterprise Linux 3.0-4.0, SUSE 
Linux Enterprise Server 9, MS Windows Server 2003

(Documentation: white paper: 
http://www.sun.com/servers/entry/x4100/arch-wp.pdf)

Best regards,
Frank.

[LinuxBIOS] Is this system supported? SUN FIRE X4100

[Duncan Laurie]

On Mon, 10 Apr 2006, Lu, Yinghai wrote:
> What OS are you going to use?
>
> Things to be checked
> settings for to make management card working

Nothing required IIRC, but optional features such as the boot
mailbox are available.  The service processor does not have
an RTC so it relies on the BIOS to set its time with Set SEL
Time command but this could be easily done after boot with
the OpenIPMI driver and ipmitool script.

Flash of system BIOS can be done through the service processor
as it has hooks into the LPC bus (system must be in reset for
this to work).  This means a LinuxBIOS port would not be overly
dangerous since you can always flash a working BIOS by reloading
SP firmware (which includes a system BIOS).
> Is the LSI FW on BIOS flash or another separate flash?
> Boot from SAS raid directly? We may need to use big IDE flash for using tiny kernel and kexec...

LSI firmware is on a separate flash.  Disk boot will be tricky
but getting network boot working should be easier.  Boot over
redirected USB via service processor might also work...

-duncan
> -----Original Message-----
> From: [e-mail] [mailto:[e-mail]] On Behalf Of Frank Rust
> Sent: Monday, April 10, 2006 12:42 AM
> To: [e-mail]
> Subject: [LinuxBIOS] Is this system supported? SUN FIRE X4100
>
> Is this one supported, or might become supported soon?
> System SUN FIRE X4100
>
> Mainboard manufacturer: (SUN?)
> Processor: one or two Opteron or Opteron Dual Core
> Chipset: AMD 8131, AMD 8111
> IO: quad channel SAS raid (LSI SAS 1064)
> Net: 2 dual 10/100/1000 Ethernet Controllers (Intel FW82546 GB NIC)
> Video: ATI Rage XL
> Floppy Disc, legacy Serial: SMSC LPC47B272 Super IO Controller
> (additional: Management: Motorola MPC8248PowerPC Processor)
>
> Supported OS: Solaris 10 x64, RedHat Enterprise Linux 3.0-4.0, SUSE 
> Linux Enterprise Server 9, MS Windows Server 2003
>
> (Documentation: white paper: 
> http://www.sun.com/servers/entry/x4100/arch-wp.pdf)
>
> Best regards,
> Frank.

[LinuxBIOS] Is this system supported? SUN FIRE X4100

[Stefan Reinauer]

* Duncan Laurie  [060410 20:13]:
> Flash of system BIOS can be done through the service processor
> as it has hooks into the LPC bus (system must be in reset for
> this to work).  This means a LinuxBIOS port would not be overly
> dangerous since you can always flash a working BIOS by reloading
> SP firmware (which includes a system BIOS).

If it works similar to the Sun Fire v20z (newisys 2100e) the flash
upgrade mechanism in the SP is pretty useless as it only works when you
did not mess up the bios of the machine. What this does is tell the
bios: "Please update yourself, here's the data"

Doing the port does not sound too hard though, given you have a 
local machine.

Stefan

[LinuxBIOS] Is this system supported? SUN FIRE X4100

[Duncan Laurie]

On Tue, 11 Apr 2006, Stefan Reinauer wrote:
> Duncan Laurie  [060410 20:13]:
> > Flash of system BIOS can be done through the service processor
> > as it has hooks into the LPC bus (system must be in reset for
> > this to work).  This means a LinuxBIOS port would not be overly
> > dangerous since you can always flash a working BIOS by reloading
> > SP firmware (which includes a system BIOS).
>
> If it works similar to the Sun Fire v20z (newisys 2100e) the flash
> upgrade mechanism in the SP is pretty useless as it only works when you
> did not mess up the bios of the machine. What this does is tell the
> bios: "Please update yourself, here's the data"

This one is different; considerably more invasive but useful.
It does not care what (if anything) is currently loaded in the
system bios flash and will read and write directly via the LPC
bus.  Since LPC is no good at sharing this requires the system
to be held in reset to guarantee it is idle or all sorts of
strange things will happen.

The downside is you cannot do a BIOS upgrade via the SP through
an in-band method since you would lose communiation. (tricks could
be done to load the image first and flash later but then you lose
notification of failures, etc etc)  It is still possible to do
a direct BIOS flash on the system with the right (DOS) tool.

-duncan

[LinuxBIOS] Is this system supported? SUN FIRE X4100

[Stefan Reinauer]

* Duncan Laurie  [060411 18:31]:
> This one is different; considerably more invasive but useful.
> It does not care what (if anything) is currently loaded in the
> system bios flash and will read and write directly via the LPC
> bus.  Since LPC is no good at sharing this requires the system
> to be held in reset to guarantee it is idle or all sorts of
> strange things will happen.

Nice! Keeping the system in reset is nothing evil, as a system with a
corrupted bios won't do much anyways :)
> The downside is you cannot do a BIOS upgrade via the SP through
> an in-band method since you would lose communiation. (tricks could
> be done to load the image first and flash later but then you lose
> notification of failures, etc etc)  It is still possible to do
> a direct BIOS flash on the system with the right (DOS) tool.

or probably with the LinuxBIOS flashrom utility.

Stefan