Funtoo Linux Installation on SPARC
Contents |
Introduction
This section assumes you are a bit familiar with SPARC machines and the SPARC architecture in general. Before diving a bit deeper, bear in mind that more than 95% of a Funtoo SPARC System behaves in exactly the same way as what you have on x86 system. Once installed, you should see a near-nothing difference between a Funtoo SPARC machine and a classic Funtoo x86/amd64 machine, same tools, same way to manage common tasks, etc.
Pre-installation setup
Disk partitioning
The harddrive must respect the following
Troubleshooting
OpenBoot
Q: Is it possible to update OpenBoot from a Linux machine ?
R: Yes, absolutely. OBP updates are provided in a statically linked and standalone program and contrary to a urban legend you do not need to have Solaris installed. You have several choices :
- Use the flash device (kernel option to activate) from a live Linux system but unfortunately this procedure is not clearly documented on the Internet.
- Put the update image on the machine (boot disk /the-OBP-update-file) and boot on it. It is required that this image resides in the very first harddrive gigabyte and, of course, that the filesystem used is readable by OBP (UFS, EXT2...). How warrant the first condition ? Simply have a partition at the beginning of the hard drive which size is less than 1 GB. Is is also required to put the image directly in the root of the partition and not in a subdirectory.
- Put the update on a TFTP server and "netboot" it from there (boot net /the-OpenPROM-update-file)
Q: When netbooting the machine with a remote TFTP/RARP server, the machine grabs its IP address but then... nothing. It just says "TFTP transfert timeout".
R: This is a known issue with some OBP versions (most notably OBP 4.17.1). Network traffic sniffing shows that the TFTP session is initiated by the SPARC machine but OBP TFTP client seems to not listen anymore on its client, thus generating "Destination port unreachable" ICMP messages on the network. Solution, if your machine support it, try to wanboot it or try to netboot with DHCP requests instead of RARP (type : boot net:dhcp at the OpenBoot prompt).
Q: I do not see my on-board ethernet controller with lspci in Linux and OpenBoot shows that the net device has been disabled. Is there a way to enable it again ?
R: It could happen for some reason (like a buggy driver which leaves the Ethernet controller in a bogus state), OpenBoot consider the onboard Ethernet as defective and disable it. This is very easy to see : pay attention to what is displayed when the machine is powered-on.
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Copyright 2005 Sun Microsystems, Inc. All rights reserved.
OpenBoot 4.17.1, 4096 MB memory installed, Serial *********
ERROR: The following devices are disabled:
net
The answer lies in the ASR (Automatic System Recovery), so at the OpenBoot prompt type the following commands notice the dot in the first command, 'ok' is the OpenBoot prompt) :
ok .asr ok asr-clean ok reset-all
