Hi, this is just a short announcement about a rough way to boot the SNI RM series from disk. As Thomas Bogendoerfer found out the SNI RM needs an additional "Volume Trailer" to the SGI Volhdr to find its partitions. Last weekend we wrote a little program to generate a minimal Volume Trailer and thus allow the Prom to find the partitions and volume header. Also we modified arcboot to be able to boot on the SNI machines. This contains a very crude hack to find the prom_seek entry point which is not officially exported by the SNI Prom. We successfully bootet an RM200-225, RM200-C40 and an RM400-220. Here is the tool to write the SNI Volume Trailer. Beware - this writes to your disk and probably even within your last partition. The Volume Trailer is on the last cylinder the last 2 tracks so you better shrink your last partition by one cylinder. To successfully boot/write a Volume Trailer all partitions need to start on a cylinder boundary. Currently it is hardcoded to /dev/sda. It trys to find the Disk Geometry with SCSI Mode Page and READ_CAPACITY calls and parses the SGI Volhdr into the Volume Trailer. This should be integrated into fdisk and/or parted which both have bugs in creating cylinder boundary partitions. http://silicon-verl.de/home/flo/projects/snirm/software/snitrail.20070813.tgz Here is the modified arcboot. Its not well integrated yet and just a hack get it to work. Build the arcboot code with SUBARCH=SNIRM and store the resulting ext2load with dvhtool into your volume header. You should strip the filename as the prom fails to get more than 20 chars in the bootfile variable (remember the dkncr(0,0,X)). Currently the OSPartition is hardcoded to "dkncr(0,0,1)" as the SNI Prom lacks the option. Also the OSOption is missing thus the arcboot.conf label is hardcoded to "linux". http://silicon-verl.de/home/flo/projects/snirm/software/arcboot-0.3.8.8.snirm.20070813.tgz Flo -- Florian Lohoff flo@xxxxxxxxxx +49-171-2280134 Those who would give up a little freedom to get a little security shall soon have neither - Benjamin Franklin
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