booting RHEL6

[Radu Molnar]

I haven't got to test this yet but i did notice that the yaboot that RedHat ships is patched to increase LOAD_BUFFER_SIZE to 0x02000000, so i guess they hit the same problem, with their ramdisk beeing too large.

I'm stuck on testing net booting RHEL6.1 because of some weird issue on my POWER6 machine. Just throwing it our there, in case you guys have seen this before. It seems that the filename argument in my boot net command is ignored and replaced with bogus characters:
0 > boot net:,yaboot,,
 
TFTP BOOT
---------------------------------------------------
Server
IP.....................192.168.205.226
Client
IP.....................192.168.205.254
Gateway
IP....................192.168.205.225
Subnet
Mask...................255.255.255.224
( 1  ) Filename.................�����Q�
TFTP Retries..................5 
Block
Size....................512 
1 
2 
3 
       
!EA017021 !

And if i do a tcpdump on the tftp server i see this:
08:12:59.812664 IP (tos 0x0, ttl
255, id 9234, offset 0, flags [none], proto 17, length: 48)
192.168.205.254.41002 > 192.168.205.226.tftp: [no cksum]  20 RRQ
"M-:^DM- at M-(M-MM-bM-;^B^_QM-^?" octet 


So basically instead of requesting the file "yaboot" from the server, my machine requests "M-:^DM- at M-(M-MM-bM-;^B^_QM-^?". The firmware was updated to the latest version but still no change.

Anyway, just in case you've seen this before.

Thanks,
Radu


________________________________
From: Tony Breeds <tony at bakeyournoodle.com>
To: Tai Pan <taipan_yh at yahoo.com>
Cc: "yaboot-users at lists.ozlabs.org" <yaboot-users at lists.ozlabs.org>
Sent: Friday, July 22, 2011 4:01 AM
Subject: Re: booting RHEL6

On Thu, Jul 21, 2011 at 06:34:49AM -0700, Tai Pan wrote:
> Hello Tony,
> Indeed i didn't know that RHEL6 no longer supports POWER5. I guess that
> explains the second problem. I'll get a POWER6 machine and try it again.

More or less.

> But for the first problem, i'm pretty sure i'll be able to reproduce it
> again, even on POWER6, as it doesn't really have anything to do with the
> arch. LOAD_BUFFER_SIZE is just not large enough. I didn't use the RHEL
> yaboot, i simply compiled it from the tar.gz on the yaboot page. Although
> RHEL6 uses an older yaboot, 1.3.14, in which LOAD_BUFFER_SIZE is even lower,
> if i remember correctly.

Yes you'll need to up the LOAD_BUFFER_SIZE to cover ~32MB (note without getting
tricky 32MB is the max you can set it to).

> I'll retry it on POWER6 with the default value and debugging as soon as i
> can.

You shoudl for the sake of simplicity also ensure your real-base is 12MB
(c00000)  Other values may work, but 12MB is the best tested value.

Yours Tony
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