Subject: boot linux - wish

From: [email-masked] (Ariel Faigon)
Date: Fri, 15 Aug 1997 13:17:06 -0700 (PDT)

Miguel wrote:

: Ok, it is not that simple.  
:
: The problem is that the Linux kernel does not have a module for
: accessing EFS, so you have to do this in two steps:
:

Hi,

Could someone rise to the challenge of writing a utility
that will install Linux on an IRIX machine?

It can ask questions like:
	Do you want to boot Linux from a [L]ocal disk or from
	a [R]emote machine [l/r] ? ...

And:
	To install Linux locally, you'll need a free partition.
	On what partition do you want to install Linux on [/dev/sdb7]?

And give hints like:
	Sorry you don't have the e2fs tools installed on IRIX yet
	should I download them from ftp.linux.sgi.com [y/n]?

And give big warnings like:
	Are you sure you want to destroy your IRIX /dev/sdb7 partition
	by running mke2fs on it [y/n]? 

But it should make it much easier for non-hackers to install
Linux side-by-side with IRIX.

This utility should give ask the user where from to take a kernel
etc. but it should have good defaults like getting it from
ftp://ftp.linux.sgi.com/ etc.

Lastly: it can have two steps (before reboot and after)
but it should do enough sanity checks and user confirms to make
sure it does the right thing.

A working utility like this is effectively a HOWTO and can be much
more useful for most people.

-- 
Peace, Ariel

---

From: Mike Shaver <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 15 Aug 1997 16:23:48 -0400 (EDT)

> that will install Linux on an IRIX machine?

If no-one else has done so by the time I get my Indy, I'll give that a shot.
I'll probably use the initrd stuff to put all the fdisk/mke2fs stuff
on, unless I decide to give the RH install stuff a try.  The latter is
more forward-looking, so that's my preference.

Mike

-- 
#> Mike Shaver ([email-masked]) Ingenia Communications Corporation 
#>              Commando Developer - Whatever It Takes
#>                                                                     
#> "See, you not only have to be a good coder to create a system like
#>    Linux, you have to be a sneaky bastard too." - Linus Torvalds

---

From: Alex deVries <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 15 Aug 1997 16:38:14 -0400 (EDT)

> that will install Linux on an IRIX machine?

I don't mind rising to that challenge, but one huge obstacle is how do we
get the utility to partition the Linux drive? 

I'm guessing the solution is to write a utility that from within Irix
talks directly to the raw SCSI disk to setup the partitions.  I have NO
idea how to do this as I doubt the raw disk interface is anything like
that in Linux. Clues accepted.

Does anyone have any suggestions to this?

> 	should I download them from ftp.linux.sgi.com [y/n]?

Er, does such a tool in fact exist?

In any case, I don't mind handling the writing of such a utility so long
as I get help with the two parts I'm as of yet unable to address:
partitioning and setting up boot options without entering the boot
monitor.

- Alex

---

From: Mike Shaver <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 15 Aug 1997 16:53:01 -0400 (EDT)

> get the utility to partition the Linux drive? 

Oliver is working on fdisk, I believe.
Last I heard, he was working on the geometry-query issue.  Oliver?

> Er, does such a tool in fact exist?

Yup.
That's how I made bogomips' ext2 drive initially.

Mike

-- 
#> Mike Shaver ([email-masked]) Ingenia Communications Corporation 
#>                 Ignore the man behind the curtain.                  
#>                                                                     
#> "And then I realized that it never should have worked in the first  
#>  place.  Thus, it would not work again until rewritten." --- Anon.

---

From: Alex deVries <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 15 Aug 1997 16:59:37 -0400 (EDT)

> That's how I made bogomips' ext2 drive initially.

Silly me, but what's it called, and exactly where is it?

- Alex

---

From: Miguel de Icaza <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 15 Aug 1997 16:46:07 -0500

> get the utility to partition the Linux drive? 

the fx command is used to partition disks on IRIX.  It took me a while
to work around the user friendlyness of it, but then, I wanted to keep
a part of my disk with XFS (because I just LOVE that file system) and
the rest for my ext2fs.

> that in Linux. Clues accepted.

The only thing you need to do is access the first sector in the disk.
this one holds the disk label with the current partition definitions.
Oliver at .at was working on getting Linux FDISK up and running, you
can probably talk with him.

> Er, does such a tool in fact exist?

Yes.  get the e2fsprogs suite, it is the only thing you need to
populate a file system.

Miguel.

---

From: Miguel de Icaza <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 15 Aug 1997 16:47:24 -0500

> more forward-looking, so that's my preference.

Agreed.  I really preffer this way of setting up Linux, but this
basically forces you to have an NFS server with the installation files
somewhere accessible.

Ariel's suggestion will work even if you can't get your hands on an
NFS server nearby.

Miguel.

---

From: Alex deVries <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 15 Aug 1997 18:03:20 -0400 (EDT)

> Ariel's suggestion will work even if you can't get your hands on an

... or a local CDROM with the appropriate directory structure, and RPMs
ready to install.

(Am I wrong, or are SGI distribution CD's not ISO9660?  It makes it really
hard to read without a CD ROM connected to my Indy).

- Alex

---

From: Mike Shaver <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 15 Aug 1997 21:05:34 -0400 (EDT)

> basically forces you to have an NFS server with the installation files

Really?
If I stick all the RH stuff in an initrd and then they do FTP install,
then they should be able to use it via boot /vmlinux or boot -f
bootp()..., no?

Mike

-- 
#> Mike Shaver ([email-masked]) Ingenia Communications Corporation 
#>           Resident Linux bigot and kernel hacker. (OOPS!)           
#> `If you get bitten by a bug, tough luck...the one thing I won't do  
#> is feel sorry for you.  In fact, I might ask you to do it all over  
#> again, just to get more information.  I'm a heartless bastard.'     
#>                       -- Linus Torvalds (on development kernels)

---

From: Eric Kimminau <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 16 Aug 1997 01:08:48 -0400

> Yes.  get the e2fsprogs suite, it is the only thing you need to

Is there ever ANY chance of seeing XFS in Linux? Or a flavor of a really
fast journaled file system?

-- 
Eric Kimminau                             System Engineer
[email-masked]                       Silicon Graphics, Inc
Vox:(810) 848-4455                        39001 West 12mile Road
Fax:(810)848-5600                         Farmington, MI 48331-2903
            "I speak my mind and no one else's."
    http://www.dcs.ex.ac.uk/~aba/rsa/perl-rsa-sig.html

-----END PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK-----
http://bs.mit.edu:11371/pks/lookup?op=vindex&search=Eric+A.+Kimminau&fingerprint=on

---

From: Ralf Baechle <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 16 Aug 1997 08:18:21 +0200 (MET DST)

FYI:

>From [email-masked]  Wed Aug 13 00:13:50 1997
Date: Tue, 12 Aug 1997 14:57:45 -0700 (PDT)
From: [email-masked] (Adam J. Richter)
To: [email-masked]
Subject: LINUX-LJFS: snapshot FTPable
Sender: [email-masked]
Reply-To: [email-masked]
Status: RO

	The Fall 1994 and Fall 1995 releases of Yggdrasil Plug & Play
Linux include development snapshots of a compressed log strucutred
filesystem for Linux.  This code is not functional.  An updated
snapshot is now FTPable from:

ftp://ftp.yggdrasil.com/private/adam/linux-2.0.30.ygg.tar.gz
ftp://ftp.yggdrasil.com/private/adam/mklogfs.c

	There is no fsck program yet.

	Again, this is just a snapshot.  The code is not yet functional,
but it is lightyears ahead of the discussions on this list and it includes
the sorts of kernel modifications necessary to implement a fast log
strucutured filesystem under the Linux kernel.  The code should be
instructuctive and should provide a good starting point for anyone
wanted to implement a log structured filesystem under Linux.

	Be warned that when I get back to hacking on this filesystem,
I intend to make some incompatible changes to the filesystem format.
In particular, it will use btrees to map logical blocks to physical
blocks and the directory structure will support something faster
than linear searches to find a file name in a directory.

Adam J. Richter     __     ______________   4880 Stevens Creek Blvd, Suite 205
[email-masked]     \ /                  San Jose, California 95129-1034
+1 408 261-6630         | g g d r a s i l   United States of America
fax +1 408 261-6631      "Free Software For The Rest Of Us."

---

From: [email-masked] (Alan Cox)
Date: Sat, 16 Aug 1997 13:08:12 +0100 (BST)

> then they should be able to use it via boot /vmlinux or boot -f

2.1.4x blows up with an initrd - hopefully fixed in 2.1.50/soon but that
means the SGI one will corrupt and explode atm

---

From: Mike Shaver <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 16 Aug 1997 10:15:48 -0400 (EDT)

> means the SGI one will corrupt and explode atm

I thought Ijust saw something from Bill Hawes cross the list that
addressed that, actually.  Regardless, they've got at least a week to
get 2.1.x playing nicely with initrds before I'll get a chance to use
it on the Indy. The initrd stuff is the trivial part, and should
operate identically to having it mounted via NFS-root.

Thanks for the warning, though.

Mike

-- 
#> Mike Shaver ([email-masked]) Ingenia Communications Corporation 
#>      Chief System Architect -- will tame sendmail(8) for food       
#>                                                                     
#> "You are a very perverse individual, and I think I'd like to get to 
#>  know you better." --- [email-masked]

---

From: Miguel de Icaza <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 16 Aug 1997 15:25:48 -0500

> fast journaled file system?

not right now.  And getting an XFS clone to work on Linux is really
not a trivial task.

Miguel.

---

From: Ralf Baechle <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 16 Aug 1997 22:33:17 +0200 (MET DST)

> means the SGI one will corrupt and explode atm

There are also additional MIPS bugs in the RAMdisk / initrd stuff.
Shame on me, I have not used (-> debugged) it since the new style
ramdisk code was merged ...

  Ralf

---

From: Vincent Renardias <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 16 Aug 1997 22:54:01 +0100 (GMT+0100)

> not right now.  And getting an XFS clone to work on Linux is really

Are the XFS specs. available BTW?

	Cordialement,

--
-     ** Linux **         +-------------------+             ** WAW **     -
-  [email-masked]     | RENARDIAS Vincent |          [email-masked]  -
-  Debian/GNU Linux       +-------------------+      http://www.waw.com/  -
-  http://www.debian.org/           |            WAW  (33) 4 91 81 21 45  -
---------------------------------------------------------------------------

---

From: Ralf Baechle <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 17 Aug 1997 00:07:45 +0200 (MET DST)

> Are the XFS specs. available BTW?

There is a whitepaper available on SGI's webserver.  It however does
not refer to the really interesting details.

As far as the complexity of writing an XFS-like fs is concerned - SGI has
invested a significant fraction of the R&D of XFS into the realtime stuff.
So ignoring that part for the beginning makes the task of writing a XFS
like filesystem much easier.

  Ralf

---

From: [email-masked] (Alan Cox)
Date: Sun, 17 Aug 1997 13:33:22 +0100 (BST)

> like filesystem much easier.

An XFS reader doesn't look too difficult, we can even take the btree
code from the Mac HFS driver. It should be possible to put the writing
algorithm back together by working back from the actual allocation patterns
for blocks the system makes

---

From: Alex deVries <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 18 Aug 1997 00:25:32 -0400 (EDT)

Does someone have an old pre-compiled kernel with which initrd is working
properly?  I've prepared a ram disk image (soon to be cvs'd) that might
work, but because of the broken initrd in the current kernel, I'm not
going to bother.

Thanks.

- Alex "who finally read enough to figure out how to create a ram disk
image, got Linux for Sparc processors installed sans floppy, and ran a 35
minute 5 miler in one day, I thank Fig Newtons" deVries

      Alex deVries              Success is realizing 
  System Administrator          attainable dreams.
   The EngSoc Project

---

From: Alex deVries <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 18 Aug 1997 21:37:06 -0400 (EDT)

I'm using the kernel that was precompiled, and mentioned on the list
earlier.

Things I notice about the kernel:
- it crashes occasionally on bootup, saying 'spinning' at the end
- on CAD, it just says "Disabling R4600 SCACHE", and does nothing
- when I'm doing a lot of NFS IO, it says the NFS server has timedout.  I
really doubt it, considering the available speed of my NFS server.

Disk problems I'm having:
- occasionally, my mounts will just disappear.  One moment I'll have /proc
mounted, the next it'll be gone.  It's very difficult to copy filesystems
like this.
- /proc/mounts claims that my NFS-root mounted / is rw, but I always get
permission errors when trying to write to it.
- I'm apparantly not intelligent enough to use fx to partition my sdb
correctly.  I put it in expert mode, but I simply cannot delete partition
10, the volume.  What should the partition table look like from fx's view
point?  In Linux, I get:
 sdb:Dev 08:10 SGI disklabel: bad magic 000000000
 unknown partition table

Ideas?

Thank god for the hidden reset button.

- Alex

---

From: Oliver Frommel <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 19 Aug 1997 12:38:27 +0200 (MET DST)

> Last I heard, he was working on the geometry-query issue.  Oliver?

yes. i've started to work on fdisk and tried to figure out
why fdisk returned "wrong" disk parameters (this was an issue on kernel-dev a 
 while ago) and digged through the low and mid level block device drivers.
unfortunately the indy i was using is now being used for some other project
until mid september :(

oliver