Linux for SPARC Boot Issue

June 27, 2016 admin

I am running an Oracle Linux for SPARC ldom and had a couple boot issues recently. This may help getting past boot issues.

First issue was because I had a cdrom attached to the ldom and that path was not valid. Like unmounted NFS path for example. That caused a kernel dump and per the development list they will take this as a bug and fix in a future update. The workaround of course was simple once I figured out what was choking. Just remove invalid disk attachment.

The second issue was much more tricky and not until I spotted some selinux message on kernel panics did I realize some recent change I made with selinux profiles must have caused a missing config. The fix is to disable selinux but that was not as easy as I thought. Here is what I did and it may help someone else trying to pass kernel bootup parameters.
1. disable auto-boot

# ldm set-var auto-boot\?=false linuxsparc_ldom

2. Get into the boot prompt. This was the tricky part because the linux kernel started booting as soon as I type boot or boot disk. Plus either I did not have enough time before Silo boots the kernel or it is having an issue with normal Esc or Shift keystrokes to pause bootup. I am not sure but it kept booting whatever keystrokes I tried. What I ended up doing is using "-s". I did "boot -s" which in normal SPARC world means it will boot the kernel in single user mode. I did not really expect openboot to pass single user to linux kernel boot but at least it stops then at boot prompt.

{0} ok boot disk -s
Boot device: /virtual-devices@100/channel-devices@200/disk@0  File and args: -s
SILO Version 1.4.14 - Rel: 4.0.18.el6
\
Welcome to Linux for SPARC!
Hit <TAB> for boot options
Your imagename `-s' and arguments `' have either wrong syntax,
or describe a label which is not present in silo.conf
Type `help' at the boot: prompt if you need it and then try again.
boot: 
4.1.12-32.el6uek.sparc64  linux-uek

3. Now boot the linux kernel with selinux=0

boot: 4.1.12-32.el6uek.sparc64 selinux=0
Allocated 64 Megs of memory at 0x40000000 for kernel
Loaded kernel version 4.1.12
Loading initial ramdisk (25972306 bytes at 0