Re: [patch] set prefix on PPC - briQ results

[Marco Gerards <metgerards@student.han.nl>]

Hollis Blanchard <hollis@penguinppc.org> writes:

> I've tested the patch on briQ. As far as I can tell, CodeGen's
> "SmartFirmware" is crap, frequently suffering mysterious failures that
> require unplugging and waiting (unplugging and replugging rapidly
> isn't enough). It also suffers frequent ATA failures, where the disk
> or controller simply stop responding.
>
> 1. (major) Firmware does not properly set /chosen/bootpath to include
> the partition number.

What happens?  Is it something I could try to reproduce on the PegasosII?

> 2. (major) Partition numbering *seems* to be 0-based. I had a lot of
> problems booting, but I'm pretty sure it is.

Same on the pegasos... :/

> 3. (minor) /chosen/bootpath is this:
> 	/pci@FF500000/isa@6/ide@i1F0/disk@0,0
> but the "hd" devalias is this:
> 	/pci@FF500000/isa@6/ide@i1f0/disk@0,0
> Note the differing case of "f". This prevents the devalias matching
> from succeeding. I've fixed this by using strncasecmp instead of
> strncmp.

That seems the right way to solve this problem.

> Problem 1 could be worked around by taking the yaboot approach:
> iterate over all disk partitions looking for a file named
> "/grub/grub.cfg" (i.e. /boot/grub/grub.cfg). This fallback can be used
> if we do not find a grub.cfg in prefix.

Right...

> Problem 2 could be worked around by blacklisting firmwares based on
> the /openprom properties. Here is the briQ's output:

With blacklist you mean setting some additional flags that describe
which bugs the firmware has?

> 	ok dev /openprom
> 	ok .properties
> 	relative-addressing
> 	model                 "BRIQ,1.0.2.60"
> 	SmartFirmware-version "1.1"
> 	CodeGen-copyright     "SmartFirmware(tm) Copyright 1996-2000
> by CodeGen, Inc.  All Rights Reserved."
> 	name                  "openprom"
>
> Does the Pegasos have a SmartFirmware-version property?

It does.  It has both a CodeGen and bplan copyright property.  The
SmartFirmware-version is 1.2 here.  The model is "Pegasos2,1.2".  It
seems to me that this SmartFirmware-version is not interesting because
it looks like this version is not changed for every build.

The most interesting property is "built-on", which we can use to
detect if a specific version has the bug or not.

Thanks,
Marco