• Unrecognized magic number in media label

    From John Paul Adrian Glaubitz@21:1/5 to Dennis Clarke on Wed Oct 28 11:20:02 2020
    On 10/28/20 11:12 AM, Dennis Clarke wrote:
    Everything seems to just work fine. Until reboot wherein I see :

    Boot device: /pci@1f,0/pci@1,1/scsi@2/disk@0,0:a File and args:
    Unrecognized magic number in media label
    Can't open disk label package
    Evaluating: boot

    Can't open boot device

    ok

    I am guessing that my mistake was to use a gpt label on the boot disk
    and the old firmware on this test Netra machine can only grok a sun
    label. Just a guess. Let me know if this seems reasonable.

    Yes, GPT is supported on SPARC T4 and newer only.

    Normally, when you use automatic partioning, the installer should detect whether your machine supports GPT and if not, use a Sun-based partition
    layout.

    Adrian

    --
    .''`. John Paul Adrian Glaubitz
    : :' : Debian Developer - glaubitz@debian.org
    `. `' Freie Universitaet Berlin - glaubitz@physik.fu-berlin.de
    `- GPG: 62FF 8A75 84E0 2956 9546 0006 7426 3B37 F5B5 F913

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  • From Dennis Clarke@21:1/5 to All on Wed Oct 28 11:20:02 2020
    I was just testing the installer image at :

    https://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/ports/snapshots/2020-10-13/

    Everything seems to just work fine. Until reboot wherein I see :

    Boot device: /pci@1f,0/pci@1,1/scsi@2/disk@0,0:a File and args:
    Unrecognized magic number in media label
    Can't open disk label package
    Evaluating: boot

    Can't open boot device

    ok

    I am guessing that my mistake was to use a gpt label on the boot disk
    and the old firmware on this test Netra machine can only grok a sun
    label. Just a guess. Let me know if this seems reasonable.



    --
    Dennis Clarke
    RISC-V/SPARC/PPC/ARM/CISC
    UNIX and Linux spoken
    GreyBeard and suspenders optional

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  • From Dennis Clarke@21:1/5 to John Paul Adrian Glaubitz on Sun Nov 1 20:30:02 2020
    On 10/28/20 6:16 AM, John Paul Adrian Glaubitz wrote:
    On 10/28/20 11:12 AM, Dennis Clarke wrote:
    Everything seems to just work fine. Until reboot wherein I see :

    Boot device: /pci@1f,0/pci@1,1/scsi@2/disk@0,0:a File and args:
    Unrecognized magic number in media label
    Can't open disk label package
    Evaluating: boot

    Can't open boot device

    ok

    I am guessing that my mistake was to use a gpt label on the boot disk
    and the old firmware on this test Netra machine can only grok a sun
    label. Just a guess. Let me know if this seems reasonable.

    Yes, GPT is supported on SPARC T4 and newer only.

    Normally, when you use automatic partioning, the installer should detect whether your machine supports GPT and if not, use a Sun-based partition layout.

    I may have mentioned in the past that I *always* use the expert mode
    text installer to get the job done. Mostly because I can walk away from
    the machine and run the bulk of the installation process remote over a
    ssh connection. That is the greatest feature in the installer ever!
    Certainly top of the top ten features in an otherwise slick and easy
    installer process. I assure you that Red Hat could learn a lot. I hate
    their graphical garbage installer.

    The other great feature of the expert mode is that I can set the ip
    address and not get locked into DHCP. I do have a very small DHCP subnet
    but that is only to deal with a few windows clients. Otherwise all hosts
    fall into a subnet 172.16.35.1/26 which is for lab systems. It does just
    work great and I even have ppc64 and ppp64le running fine. I don't do
    anything graphical on those hosts other than some X11 work.

    The sparc64 installer from 2020-10-13 works great and the only snag
    I hit was self inflicted with the gpt label. I knew when I did it that
    it was a mistake but plowed ahead anyways. I do wish there was a way to
    get an M3000 or even better an M4000 running as those things have actual
    horse power for real world work. The XSCF is not a big deal to manage on
    those but I suspect the firmware is the real problem once one gets a
    console to a hardware domain. I don't know. I have not tried on those
    machines in years and would like to get my M4000 up and running just to
    see what happens.

    In any case, thank you for the great work and I wanted to simply let
    you know that sparc64 seems to work fine for the basic stuff anyone
    would want.

    --
    Dennis Clarke
    RISC-V/SPARC/PPC/ARM/CISC
    UNIX and Linux spoken
    GreyBeard and suspenders optional

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  • From Hermann Lauer@21:1/5 to Dennis Clarke on Mon Nov 2 08:50:02 2020
    On Sun, Nov 01, 2020 at 07:21:40PM +0000, Dennis Clarke wrote:
    I may have mentioned in the past that I *always* use the expert mode
    text installer to get the job done. Mostly because I can walk away from
    the machine and run the bulk of the installation process remote over a
    ssh connection. That is the greatest feature in the installer ever!
    Certainly top of the top ten features in an otherwise slick and easy installer process. I assure you that Red Hat could learn a lot. I hate
    their graphical garbage installer.

    +1 here - having the text mode is an outstanding feature, especially
    when you combine it with serial logging. And yes, on all the machines
    with no serial I do installation over ssh, too.

    Also great is netbooting - learned that installation method years ago as "jumpstart" in solaris an use it whenever possible. It's amazing how
    flawless that concept works on small ARM SoC with uboot over serial lines.

    In any case, thank you for the great work and I wanted to simply let
    you know that sparc64 seems to work fine for the basic stuff anyone
    would want.

    Thanks from my side too and hoping for an opportunity (time!) to try on
    the old sun iron still beeing in our basement.

    Greetings
    Hermann

    --
    Administration/Zentrale Dienste, Interdiziplinaeres
    Zentrum fuer wissenschaftliches Rechnen der Universitaet Heidelberg
    IWR; INF 205; 69120 Heidelberg; Tel: (06221)54-14405 Fax: -14427
    Email: Hermann.Lauer@iwr.uni-heidelberg.de

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