{"id":2111,"date":"2017-11-21T20:37:46","date_gmt":"2017-11-22T04:37:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rglinuxtech.com\/?p=2111"},"modified":"2017-11-21T20:37:46","modified_gmt":"2017-11-22T04:37:46","slug":"ia64-an-exercise-in-nostalgia","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rglinuxtech.com\/?p=2111","title":{"rendered":"IA64 – An Exercise in Nostalgia.."},"content":{"rendered":"

Ever since I spent some considerable time promoting HP’s IA64 Linux systems, way back in the early-2000’s, I have always wanted one for myself, and I recently managed to acquire an RX2600<\/strong> 1U server for a very reasonable price, and beef it up with some inexpensive parts from eBay..<\/p>\n

The spec – at the moment – is 2x 1.5Ghz ‘Madison’ CPUs, and 8GB memory, and one 74GB U320 disk.. This basic chassis is identical to the one used for the ‘workstation’ version – the Z6000 – and I am planning to do a conversion, to allow better (AGP) graphics..<\/p>\n

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RX2600 Chassis<\/p><\/div>\n

I had managed to track down the remaining IA64 versions of various Distros, and the ‘latest’ (2008..) one was Fedora 9<\/strong>, which is still available online, if you are able to do some digging.. I created a DVD install disk, and made a complete copy of the old repo, including all the packages..<\/p>\n

This exercise was a good test of my install recollections from 9+ years ago, and was relatively straightforward.. As expected, there were a several things not there – or too ‘new’ – including EXT4 support. I settled on EXT3 for the time being, and this may be OK..<\/p>\n

I had been cross-compiling the latest (4.14) kernels on my F27 x86_64 system, as – fortunately – there is still a viable ia64 cross-compiler available..<\/p>\n

export ARCH=ia64<\/strong><\/span>\r\nexport CROSS_COMPILE=ia64-linux-gnu-<\/strong><\/span>\r\n etc...<\/span><\/pre>\n
I also had to (re)remember all the old LILO stuff, as the system uses the EFI version of this – ELILO..<\/p>\n
The server has 4 PCI-X slots (not PCI-Express..) and there are still a few i\/o cards available for this.. It came with an old NVIDIA Quadro NVS280 card, and I was able to get a dual-hdmi connector ‘tail’ for this..<\/p>\n
The install was only possible in ‘non-graphical’ mode, but this worked OK, and it was actually easier to use than the modern bells-and-whistles version.. IMHO..<\/p>\n
At the end, I had a working system, running the ancient 2.6.25-14 kernel..<\/p>\n
As the latest kernel still has some IA64 activity (although very little..) I decided to try to compile this natively, and get it running… More on this in a later article, but I did manage to get the compile to work, using a kernel config copied from the cross-compile testing, as I was unable to get any of the graphical configurators to work, and did not want to waste too much time..<\/p>\n
Although there is some ‘nouveau’ content with FC9, I found that with nouveau configured in the kernel, the system started to boot and then crashed\/re-booted, so I took nouveau support out for the time being (just using framebuffer)<\/p>\n
Even with an ancient version of GCC (4.3.0) the kernel compile completed successfully, despite several warnings.. and after modifying the EFI and ELILO config a little – I actually got the system to boot:<\/p>\n
.....................<\/strong><\/span>\r\n tg3 0000:20:02.0 eth1: Link is up at 1000 Mbps, full duplex<\/strong><\/span>\r\n tg3 0000:20:02.0 eth1: Flow control is on for TX and on for RX<\/strong><\/span>\r\n [rgadsdon@rgia64 ~]$ uname -a<\/strong><\/span>\r\n Linux rgia64 4.14.1 #1 SMP Tue Nov 21 06:19:05 PST 2017 ia64 ia64 ia64 GNU\/Linux<\/strong><\/span><\/pre>\n
So far, I have also got webmin to work:<\/p>\n
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Webmin IA64<\/p><\/div>\n
That is all the progress to date, and my goal is to get MOCK working, and build an up-to-date Fedora 27 Distro, although this might be a touch too ambitious, as many of the tools to do this were never fully developed, and many projects on IA64 have been ‘abandoned’…<\/p>\n
Robert Gadsdon..\u00a0 November 21, 2017.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Ever since I spent some considerable time promoting HP’s IA64 Linux systems, way back in the early-2000’s, I have always wanted one for myself, and I recently managed to acquire an RX2600 1U server for a very reasonable price, and beef it up with some inexpensive parts from eBay.. The spec – at the moment – is …<\/span> Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[10,11,1298,1750,1323,1751,14,15,19,1535,1752],"tags":[101,154,192,1753,1754,1755,1756,1175,415],"class_list":["post-2111","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fedora","category-hacks","category-hardware","category-ia64","category-intel","category-itanium","category-kernel","category-linux-2","category-opinion","category-quirks","category-rx2600","tag-boot","tag-fedora-2","tag-hp","tag-ia64","tag-itanium","tag-kernel-4-14-1","tag-rx2600","tag-success","tag-webmin"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rglinuxtech.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2111","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rglinuxtech.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rglinuxtech.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rglinuxtech.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rglinuxtech.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2111"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/rglinuxtech.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2111\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2116,"href":"https:\/\/rglinuxtech.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2111\/revisions\/2116"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rglinuxtech.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2111"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rglinuxtech.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2111"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rglinuxtech.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2111"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}