Re: debian-hppa on a C8000

Dear Lothar,

On 3/15/19 10:17, Lothar Paltins wrote:
> Am 14.03.19 um 00:17 schrieb John David Anglin:
>> Helge is right.  Unless you are a ATI graphics card expert, you
>> won't be able to fix the ring test failure.
> [...]
> I don't want to do real work on this more than 13
> years old machine. It's slow compared to current machines and it
> consumes almost 300W of electrical power without any load.

But did you notice how silent the c8000 is at the same time (even with
two dual-core PA-8800/8900 installed)? :-) And for the hppa port of
Debian GNU/Linux I think it's a very good combination of size and
hardware resources. In addition it has built-in remote control
capabilities (see [1]).

[1]: https://parisc.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/BMC

> All of my HP
> workstations are just museum pieces and to be authentic, all of them are
> running HP-UX, except for this one C8000.

Nice! Would you be interested in testing these with Debian to see what
works and what does not?

All of the PA-RISC machines I own, support network booting, so maybe
yours will, too. Testing wouldn't then require an actual on disk
installation, so not touching any existing HP/UX installations or
creating the need for a disk. You only need to setup the needed
infrastructure services (DNS, DHCP, TFTP, NFS, etc.).

> But anyway, it's interesting to see that an almost current Linux runs on
> it. But it seems to be a little bit fragile. I booted it today and all
> messages on the serial console seemed to be correct, but the connected
> monitor didn't show the KDE login screen, neither via the DVI nor the
> VGA connector.

It could be needed to explicitly activate the graphics card in the BCH.
At least I assume, if you could use the serial console, it either
doesn't switch to graphics console automatically when a keyboard is
attached (as this is done for machines from other vendors, e.g. SGI,
Sun) or the console device is configured to the serial port explicitly.

> I tried to log in blindly and this worked, but the
> desktop was displayed only on the VGA connector. I logged out from the
> session and logged in again, but then the system freezes up after the
> desktop background was drawn. I had to switch it off and after powering
> it up again it crashed during the next booting.

Did that crash already happen during POST? And does your used graphics
card have an additional power connector?

I noticed instabilities on one of my c8000s with the originally equipped
ATI FireGL X1, which draws all power from the AGP port alone. Changing
it to a graphics card powered by both AGP port and additional power
connector or just removing it, "solved" the instability issues during
POST and boot for me. I wonder if these instabilities are perhaps
related to the aging of the PSU internals. In the end the exhaust air is
always pretty hot with this machine.

Cheers,
Frank