CentOS on wildfire

Robin Humble rjh+axp at cita.utoronto.ca
Sun Aug 13 09:33:02 UTC 2006


Hi,

we're trying to get CentOS 4.3 up on our gs320 (32 ev67 731MHz,
64G ram) but have been struggling a bit for several days now.
are there any recent wildfire success stories out there? (apart from
the one boot in 2000)

non-SMP kernels seem more or less ok (+/- a few Oops's) under either
CentOS's UP kernel (2.6.9-34.0.2.EC) or latest kernel.org (2.6.17.8).

in SMP mode however, 2.6.9-34.0.2.ECsmp invariably stops after
  Freeing unused kernel memory: 176k freed
the next line should probably be one of:
  Red Hat nash version 4.2.1.6 starting
  atkbd.c: keyboard reset failed on isa0060/serio1
but it's never seen...
I've tried a bunch of wildfire specific and cut-down and tweaked
.config variants of the CentOS 2.6.9 kernel for alpha but nothing seems
to help here - it doesn't get past that line.

2.6.17.8 SMP seems close to working though - except for a lost irq4 (see
the boot log at the URL below) which (naively) seems to come from the
serial handler.
the serial console is also a bit screwed up at this stage with each key
press being one behind what's visible on the serial console. the
suggested 'irqpoll' boot option makes no obvious difference.

however the good news is that once the machine is up in init 3 (and the
below log is from the only time so far that I've got it that far) then
the machine seems ok and usable over an ssh login. I have yet to stress
test it in any way.

below is some /proc info for 2.6.17.8. the serial boot log and the
.config is at http://www.cita.utoronto.ca/~rjh/alpha/

BTW, CentOS 4.3 (standard SMP kernel) works great so far on our es40s.
CentOS 4.4's gcc4/gfortran (when it's built) has OpenMP which will make
the machines just as useful as they were under Tru64.  whoo! :-) and as
soon as we fix our es45 then we'll give CentOS a run on there too...

but anyway, any hints from you alpha experts for wildfire tweaks for
failing CentOS kernels or the irq4 problem in 2.6.17.8 would be very
much appreciated.
let me know if it's more generic or if I should be posting to lkml instead.

this gs320 a non-production machine until it gets more stable (or Tru64
licenses magically become cheaper), so any speculative patches or tweaks
and many reboots are just fine...

cheers,
robin


% cat /proc/cpuinfo
cpu                     : Alpha
cpu model               : EV67
cpu variation           : 7
cpu revision            : 0
cpu serial number       : SM02603478
system type             : Wildfire
system variation        : 0
system revision         : 0
system serial number    : G2B24Y
cycle frequency [Hz]    : 730782000
timer frequency [Hz]    : 1000.00
page size [bytes]       : 8192
phys. address bits      : 44
max. addr. space #      : 255
BogoMIPS                : 1489.60
kernel unaligned acc    : 0 (pc=0,va=0)
user unaligned acc      : 0 (pc=0,va=0)
platform string         : AlphaServer GS320 6/731
cpus detected           : 32
cpus active             : 32
cpu active mask         : 00000000ffffffff
L1 Icache               : 64K, 2-way, 64b line
L1 Dcache               : 64K, 2-way, 64b line
L2 cache                : 4096K, 1-way, 64b line
L3 cache                : n/a

% cat /proc/interrupts
           CPU0       CPU1       CPU2       CPU3       CPU4       CPU5       CPU6       CPU7       CPU8       CPU9       CPU10       CPU11       CPU12       CPU13       CPU14       CPU15       CPU16       CPU17       CPU18       CPU19       CPU20       CPU21       CPU22       CPU23       CPU24       CPU25       CPU26       CPU27       CPU28       CPU29       CPU30       CPU31
  2:          0          0          0          0          0          0          0          0          0          0          0          0          0          0          0          0          0          0          0          0          0          0          0          0          0          0          0          0          0          0          0          0          XT-PIC   cascade
  4:    1003926          0          0          0          0          0          0          0          0          0          0          0          0          0          0          0          0          0          0          0          0          0          0          0          0          0          0          0          0          0          0          0        WILDFIRE   serial
  8:    1042388    1035826    1035216    1034424    1033923    1033362    1032847    1032440    1031385    1031825    1031713    1031617    1031237    1031466    1031404    1031349    1031302    1031256    1031214    1031171    1031127    1031089    1031051    1031017    1030990    1030957    1030928    1030898    1030867    1030840    1030811    1030780             RTC  +timer
 14:          1          0          0          0          0          0          0          0          0          0          0          0          0          0          0          0          0          0          0          0          0          0          0          0          0          0          0          0          0          0          0          0        WILDFIRE  +ide0
 36:      16916          0          0          0          0          0          0          0          0          0          0          0          0          0          0          0          0          0          0          0          0          0          0          0          0          0          0          0          0          0          0          0        WILDFIRE   qla1280
 40:       4417          0          0          0          0          0          0          0          0          0          0          0          0          0          0          0          0          0          0          0          0          0          0          0          0          0          0          0          0          0          0          0        WILDFIRE   eth0
296:      22137          0          0          0          0          0          0          0          0          0          0          0          0          0          0          0          0          0          0          0          0          0          0          0          0          0          0          0          0          0          0          0        WILDFIRE   qla1280
IPI:       1275       1297       1361       1358       1387       1392       1398       1413       1403       1405       1413       1429       1418       1396       1401       1418       1395       1399       1406       1415       1406       1409       1418       1412       1417       1414       1418       1410       1400       1409       1416       1414
ERR:          0

% free
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:      66467080     145960   66321120          0      16968      49072
-/+ buffers/cache:      79920   66387160
Swap:      4194264          0    4194264

% lspci
00:01.0 SCSI storage controller: QLogic Corp. ISP1020 Fast-wide SCSI (rev 05)
00:02.0 PCI bridge: Digital Equipment Corporation DECchip 21154 (rev 02)
00:07.0 ISA bridge: ALi Corporation M1533/M1535 PCI to ISA Bridge [Aladdin IV/V/V+] (rev c3)
00:0f.0 IDE interface: ALi Corporation M5229 IDE (rev c1)
00:13.0 USB Controller: ALi Corporation USB 1.1 Controller (rev 03)
01:04.0 Ethernet controller: Intel Corporation 82557/8/9 [Ethernet Pro 100] (rev 05)
01:05.0 Ethernet controller: Intel Corporation 82557/8/9 [Ethernet Pro 100] (rev 05)
0002:03:01.0 PCI bridge: Digital Equipment Corporation DECchip 21154 (rev 05)
0002:04:04.0 Ethernet controller: Intel Corporation 82557/8/9 [Ethernet Pro 100] (rev 05)
0002:04:05.0 Ethernet controller: Intel Corporation 82557/8/9 [Ethernet Pro 100] (rev 05)
0008:06:02.0 SCSI storage controller: QLogic Corp. ISP1020 Fast-wide SCSI (rev 05)
0008:06:03.0 Fibre Channel: Emulex Corporation LP8000 Fibre Channel Host Adapter (rev 02)
0009:07:07.0 SCSI storage controller: Adaptec AHA-3960D / AIC-7899A U160/m (rev 01)
0009:07:07.1 SCSI storage controller: Adaptec AHA-3960D / AIC-7899A U160/m (rev 01)
000a:08:01.0 Network controller: Digital Equipment Corporation: Unknown device 0018 (rev 24)




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