Re: about Pegasos1 (april fix 2) support

On Wed, 16 Mar 2011 00:49:22 +0100
nello martuscielli <[email protected]> wrote:

> i looked around and it seems pegasos1 is unable to boot from net
> device.

Oh, really? I didn't know about that. But I also didn't find any article
saying it should work. Which version have you got? I heard the last one was:
  0.1b114 (20030317114750)


> Thus i burned an ISO with your files.
> 
> that's booting:
> boot cd ofwboot
> http://oi54.tinypic.com/2h7lauf.jpg

Bad firmware. This definitely works on my Pegasos2. The CD-access through
SmartFirmware basically seems to work, but something is different here.

You may try the ofwbootdb with some debugging output from:
  ftp://ftp.NetBSD.org/pub/NetBSD/misc/phx/ofppc_peg1/


> and here booting directly the kernel:
> boot cd netbsd.gz
> http://oi54.tinypic.com/w2c83r.jpg

I remember that it always causes come problems to boot the kernel directly
on the Pegasos. But this shows that the kernel started. It tried to set
the graphics mode with vesa-set-mode (default is 800x600) and reads the
frame buffer address from vesa-frame-buffer-adr. Both fails, because the
Peg1 SmartFirmware probably doesn't support it.

At least we have to find a way to determine the frame-buffer address and
the screen mode to make genfb(4), the generic frame buffer driver, work.

Maybe you find that out. A last option would be to hard-code a resolution
and frame-buffer address for the Pegasos1.


> please, can you suggest me some docs to help you in a better way?

When net-booting doesn't work you don't have much options left. Maybe
it works to make a FAT16 partition on your hard disk and place ofwboot
and the netbsd kernel there, but I never tried that.

On my Pegasos2 I'm using an Amiga-FFS partition to boot ofwboot from,
which then reads the kernel from my NetBSD root partition.

The biggest problem in the Pegasos1 support is not the hardware but the
firmware bugs.

-- 
Frank Wille