[parisc-linux] PALO questions

[parisc-linux] PALO questions

[Mihails Nikitins]

Hi all,

1. PALO docs tell "recoverykernel" in palo.conf is the path to the kernel that
you want to boot within a failsafe session, it will be stored in the 'f0'
partition. Do I undertstand correctly that command like 
palo –I /dev/sda
copies file specified by paloc.conf line
--recoverykernel=/boot/vmlinux   ?

2. Is it possible to see f0 partition contents? In HP-UX, there are commands
working with LIF files like lifls and lifcp. How can I check if there is a
recovery kernel in PALO area?

3. I noticed palo warns about bad DOS magic. Is it normal?

# palo -I /dev/sda
palo version 1.0 bame@palinux Mon Apr  1 10:03:01 MST 2002
ELF32 executable
Bad DOS magic in extended partition 

fdisk -l /dev/sda

Disk /dev/sda: 64 heads, 32 sectors, 8683 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 2048 * 512 bytes

   Device Boot    Start       End    Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sda1             1        17     17392   f0  Linux/PA-RISC boot
/dev/sda2            18        50     33792   fd  Linux raid autodetect
/dev/sda3            51       563    525312   fd  Linux raid autodetect
/dev/sda4           564      8683   8314880    5  Extended
/dev/sda5           564      4683   4218864   fd  Linux raid autodetect
/dev/sda6          4684      8683   4095984   fd  Linux raid autodetect

Many thanks in advance for your clever comments!

BR,
Mihails

Re: [parisc-linux] PALO questions

[bame]

> Hi all,
> 
> 1. PALO docs tell "recoverykernel" in palo.conf is the path to the kernel that
> you want to boot within a failsafe session, it will be stored in the 'f0'
> partition. Do I undertstand correctly that command like 
> palo –I /dev/sda
> copies file specified by paloc.conf line
> --recoverykernel=/boot/vmlinux   ?

Yes, that kernel is copied to the f0 partition (or wherever you designate)

> 2. Is it possible to see f0 partition contents? In HP-UX, there are commands
> working with LIF files like lifls and lifcp. How can I check if there is a
> recovery kernel in PALO area?

Palo shows the contents in a very crude form during booting.  There is
no file system as such, like LIF, in the f0 partition, thus no convenient
tools for that.  Thought about doing something like that but the
payoff doesn't seem worth it especially since we usually boot kernels
from the file system anyway.  Feel free to send me a patch for "palo --ls"
or something :-)

> 3. I noticed palo warns about bad DOS magic. Is it normal?

Harmless if annoying.  From the source:

            /* we're currently using 32-bit file seeks which is ok since
             * the IPL is also limited to 2G right now.  So on big disks
             * this next read may fail, and we need to let that happen
             * gracefully.
             */
            if (seekread(bootdev, (char *)&fb, sizeof fb, 512 * offset) == -1)
                break;
            if (fb.dosmagic[0] != 0x55 || fb.dosmagic[1] != 0xaa)
            {
                printf("Bad DOS magic in extended partition\n\r");
                break;
            }

Either the disk is improperly formatted or (more likely) the seekread()
call isn't returning the -1 error like it should.  Since we can't
boot from anything past the 2G limit anyway it doesn't matter.