Getting IBM pSeries 520 to boot from FreeBSD disc

[Andreas Tobler]

On 29.01.14 17:15, Nathan Whitehorn wrote:
> We have limited support in -CURRENT (and in 10.0) for IBM hardware. At 
> least the 520 can be netbooted into -CURRENT and works fine, although 
> the internal SCSI controller is unsupported. I believe Andreas Tobler is 
> working on a SCSI driver.

Well, I should, but being distracted by job ;)

I have an IntelliStation 285 with a POWER5+ which boots over net.
This means I have to load the loader/kernel over tftp/nfs.
I added a cheap SATA controller with disk to the machine. With this
setup I can build pkg's etc. and store it on the SATA Disk.
So basic support is here :)
But it is not in the 10.0 Release. The minimal requirements are in
STABLE/10. But -CURRENT would be better to play with.
I'm happy to give a detailed explanation if you want to play.
We have not yet a 'Linux Ready Insert CD and Boot' solution.
Hopefully soon, but soon can take some months.
We're a two/three man show, not like ozlabs ;)

> It sounds like there is some issue with the CD setup that needs to be 
> debugged on certain firmwares. POWER LPARs with VIOS should work with 
> 10.0 (support may be a little better in -CURRENT) on any POWER system, 
> up to and including the newest POWER7+ systems, with full support for 
> storage and network. Advanced features like live partition migration and 
> hotplug of memory are not currently supported, however.

I'll have to debug the CD setup, but I pushed it back so far since I can
boot over net and the biggest hurdle is the SCSI driver.

> Not a lot of direct testing has been done, but the general situation is 
> that the PPC64 release should run on all POWER4/970 and newer hardware. 
> POWER4 whole-machine partitions probably require a new interrupt 
> controller driver, though LPARs should work (newer machines are all 
> LPAR-mode, even with only one partition) Earlier machines may or may not 
> work with the 32-bit release, depending on hardware drivers.

Ok, regarding the different flavours of POWER machines I agree, the
testing is very limited. But on my setup I was able to run heavy compile
jobs over several days w/o hickups.

For reference (not just words..), here one of the early dmesg's. In the
meantime the machine has 14GB and still runs fine.

http://people.freebsd.org/~andreast/dmesg_power5_multiuser-20131121.txt

Andreas