OT: Distribution for Power4 Machines

OT: Distribution for Power4 Machines

[Martin Knoblauch]

Hi,

 sorry for the most likely off-topic post. Are there any distributions
out there that support IBM Power4 systems (pSeries machines)?

Thanks
Martin

=====
------------------------------------------------------
Martin Knoblauch
email: k n o b i AT knobisoft DOT de
www:   http://www.knobisoft.de

Re: OT: Distribution for Power4 Machines

[Frank Steiner]

Martin Knoblauch wrote:
> Hi,
> 
>  sorry for the most likely off-topic post. Are there any distributions
> out there that support IBM Power4 systems (pSeries machines)?

SuSEs SLES8 is out for long, SLES9 for pSeries will be this month I guess.
RedHat has a version for pSeries too.
We are running SLES8 currently and it works fine except for a scsi bug
with the imbsis controller caused by the 2.4 kernel, that is fixed in
the 2.6 kernel. You will have terrible disk performance in certain
situations with 2.4. So it might be worth waiting for SLES9.

cu,
Frank

-- 
Dipl.-Inform. Frank Steiner   Web:  http://www.bio.ifi.lmu.de/~steiner/
Lehrstuhl f. Bioinformatik    Mail: http://www.bio.ifi.lmu.de/~steiner/m/
LMU, Amalienstr. 17           Phone: +49 89 2180-4049
80333 Muenchen, Germany       Fax:   +49 89 2180-99-4049

Re: OT: Distribution for Power4 Machines

[Arjan van de Ven]

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 239 bytes --]

On Wed, 2004-08-11 at 07:56, Martin Knoblauch wrote:
> Hi,
> 
>  sorry for the most likely off-topic post. Are there any distributions
> out there that support IBM Power4 systems (pSeries machines)?


RHEL3 supports those machines

[-- Attachment #2: This is a digitally signed message part --]
[-- Type: application/pgp-signature, Size: 189 bytes --]

Re: OT: Distribution for Power4 Machines

[Martin J. Bligh]

>  sorry for the most likely off-topic post. Are there any distributions
> out there that support IBM Power4 systems (pSeries machines)?

RH, SuSE and Debian all do, though maybe only the expensive enterprise
versions of the former 2.

M.

Re: OT: Distribution for Power4 Machines

[Dave Hansen]

On Wed, 2004-08-11 at 08:21, Martin J. Bligh wrote:
> >  sorry for the most likely off-topic post. Are there any distributions
> > out there that support IBM Power4 systems (pSeries machines)?
> 
> RH, SuSE and Debian all do, though maybe only the expensive enterprise
> versions of the former 2.

You can install Debian, it's just a bit of a pain.  You basically have
to replace the installer kernel with your own, and use the debian
root.bin floppy as your kernel initrd.  

http://lists.debian.org/debian-powerpc/2002/08/msg00458.html

-- Dave

Re: OT: Distribution for Power4 Machines

[Joshua Kwan]

On Wed, 11 Aug 2004 08:34:42 -0700, Dave Hansen wrote:

> On Wed, 2004-08-11 at 08:21, Martin J. Bligh wrote:
>> >  sorry for the most likely off-topic post. Are there any distributions
>> > out there that support IBM Power4 systems (pSeries machines)?
>> 
>> RH, SuSE and Debian all do, though maybe only the expensive enterprise
>> versions of the former 2.
> 
> You can install Debian, it's just a bit of a pain.  You basically have
> to replace the installer kernel with your own, and use the debian
> root.bin floppy as your kernel initrd.  

Um. Dude. That's old.

Thanks to Sven Luther our new installer fully supports power4 (as far as
I know, I don't personally own one.)

http://gluck.debian.org/cdimage/testing/daily/powerpc/current/

should contain a CD image that can boot your machine.

-- 
Joshua Kwan

Re: OT: Distribution for Power4 Machines

[David Woodhouse]

On Wed, 2004-08-11 at 08:21 -0700, Martin J. Bligh wrote:
> >  sorry for the most likely off-topic post. Are there any distributions
> > out there that support IBM Power4 systems (pSeries machines)?
> 
> RH, SuSE and Debian all do, though maybe only the expensive enterprise
> versions of the former 2.

I think Fedora rawhide should probably work too. Works fine (as does
FC2) on other ppc machines for me. Hopefully we can include ppc in the
released architectures for FC3.

-- 
dwmw2

Re: OT: Distribution for Power4 Machines

[Jake Moilanen]

> Thanks to Sven Luther our new installer fully supports power4 (as far as
> I know, I don't personally own one.)
> 
> http://gluck.debian.org/cdimage/testing/daily/powerpc/current/
> 
> should contain a CD image that can boot your machine.

Unless they fixed this very recently, the kernels they build for power4
are the 32-bit ones.  Which work fine if you are booting power4 natively
(ie without it running in partition).  As soon as a power4 box is
running in a partition the kernel breaks because the 32-bit one does not
have the hypervisor calls.

I know Tom Gall has been working on Gentoo for ppc64.  

	http://dev.gentoo.org/~tgall/

Thanks,
Jake