(Open-)Solaris on Soekris

Hi,

This weekend I finally received my Soekris 5501 system
board.
I was rather supprised how relatively easy it was to get it
to
run Solaris 10 u4.

The board I ordered has the following features: 500 Mhz AMD
Geode LX,
comBIOS, 512mb ram, 4x VIA Rhine III auto mdix nics, USB
2.0, mini-pci
and pci slot, sata/44-pin ata and CF slot.

To get the system running with Solaris 10u4 I performed the
following
preparing steps:

- flash the BIOS to at least rev 1.32i  (to resolve some
known
  boot/reboot issues)
- add a 2Gb CompactFlash to install Solaris 10u4 onto
- connect a USB CD/DVD with Solaris 10u4 CD/DVD
- setup tftp service to serve the following files from the
install CD/DVD
  boot/grub/pxegrub
  boot/multiboot
  boot/x86.miniroot
- setup dhcp service for the first NIC and configure the
  above pxegrub as the bootfile option

To start the actual installation; press ^P on the serial
console
of Soekris to enter the comBIOS and initiate a PXE boot on
the first
NIC by entering "boot f0" at the prompt. If the
DHCP/TFTP services
are setup and running correctly GRUB should show up.

On the GRUB prompt enter to bootstrap the installation ftom
the USB
connected CD/DVD drive:

grub> kernel /boot/multiboot kernel/unix -B
install_media=cdrom,console=ttya
...
grub> module /boot/x86.miniroot
...
grub> boot

The Solaris 10u4 installation shows up and a regular CD/DVD
installtion
was performed. It took quite sometime as the CF card I used,
turned out to
be very slow. Installation of the vr/vfe driver was needed
to enable the
VIA Rhine NICs, I just copied /kernel/drv/vr over from an
other system
via a USB stick. After installing the the vr driver
by add_drv -i '"pci1106,106"' vr all the NICs
showed up:

# dladm show-dev
vr0             link: unknown   speed:     0Mb  duplex:
unknown
vr1             link: unknown   speed:     0Mb  duplex:
unknown
vr2             link: unknown   speed:     0Mb  duplex:
unknown
vr3             link: unknown   speed:     0Mb  duplex:
unknown

At this time I thought "Well this went smooth, let's
try OpenSolaris
snv75a also". However installing svn75a turned out to
be a bit more
complicated:

- setup tftp service to serve the following files from the
install CD/DVD
  boot/grub/pxegrub
  boot/platform/i86pc/kernel/unix
  boot/x86.miniroot

At the GRUB prompt;

grub> kernel /boot/platform/kernel/unix -B
install_media=cdrom,console=ttya
...
grub> module /boot/x86.miniroot
...
grub> boot

This seemed to work but the system ended up with a
repeatily
terminating init process:

init(1M) exited on fatal signal 9: restarting automatically

This turned out to be known problem (CR 6332924) as the AMD
Geode LX
does not the SSE capability which is required by libc.so.1

# isainfo -v
32-bit i386 applications
        ahf amd_3dnowx amd_3dnow amd_mmx mmx cmov sep cx8
tsc fpu 
# file /lib/libc.so.1
/lib/libc.so.1: ELF 32-bit LSB dynamic lib 80386 Version 1
[SSE CX8 FPU], dynamically linked, not stripped, no
debugging information available

As known workaround for CR 6332924 I used a patched
libc.so.1 in
x86.miniroot by removing the SSE requirement
(elfedit -e 'cap:hw1 -and -cmp sse' libc.so.1)

Upon the first boot during the installation of snv75a an
other PXE
boot was needed to also fix the installed libc.so.1. After
completing
the normal installation and adding the vr driver the system
now seems
to be running fine only using a very few Watts without any
moving parts
or heatsink.

Regards,

William Wanders.
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(Open-)Solaris on Soekris

Thread: (Open-)Solaris on Soekris