Redhatter’s Web Blog

Hi All…

Whilst building a new netboot image for Cobalt systems, I discovered there’s a bug relating to the PCI handling in the latest kernel ebuild. In short, the pata_via driver is broken out-of-the-box, it’ll complain about being unable to register I/O resources, and the disks will be inaccessible.

To fix — download this patch, and apply it to your source tree using patch -p1 < patchfile, then rebuild your kernel (it’ll take a few seconds). You’ll notice the new kernel should boot successfully.

When Kumba returns, I’ll get him to add it to the mips-sources patchset so this is done automatically.

Hi All…

Those who have been trying out the 2008.0 beta stages I put out recently, probably will have ran into problems with tools like rm and touch not working properly.  It turns out, a series of kernel updates between 2.6.16 (what most of the netboot images are based on, except Cobalt which uses 2.6.13), and 2.6.19-rc5 (what my O2 runs), there have been changes to some of the system calls.  So the newer coreutils breaks on the older kernels.

I’m now in the process of updating the kernels used.  As I type this, I’m recompiling the Cobalt netboot image (same userland tools, just a newer kernel … at some point I’ll recompile the userland too), downloading the 2.6.20 kernel for IP28 users, and I’ll look into IP22 (r4k), IP30 and IP32 as well.

Sadly, R5k IP22 and IP27 will get ignored here — because I don’t have any suitable hardware to test them on.  Otherwise I’d update those too.

I’ll let you all know when the newer netboot images are available.