[rescue] OS upgrade for my SS600

[James Lockwood]

On Sat, 1 Sep 2001, Dan Debertin wrote:

> 1) I have expansion memory boards, and i had heard that the VME bus
>    was basically unsupported past 2.5.1. However, I've heard some of
>    you say that expansion memory isn't accessed via the VME bus, but
>    rather through the "P2" bus (anyone care to elaborate?). Does this
>    mean that expansion memory will or won't work with 2.{6,7}?

The P2 bus is a "user defined" set of pins, used in different ways by
different cards.  Most Sun VME CPU's used it for memory expansion, some
graphics boardsets used it for interboard communication (MVX, etc).  It is
not subject to VME arbitration and the mapping of the memory boards should
be largely transparent.  That said, I've never tried a SS600 expansion
board under an unsupported Solaris rev so I have no empirical evidence.

> 2) I have an SES/B with the SBus expansion card & cable. This is
>    basically (as far as I understand) an xbox, but without the
>    additional SCSI drive bays, and that draws *only* power from the
>    VME bus. So it seems to me that this board should work fine under
>    later OS releases, right?

Yep.

> 3) Any other gotchas to doing this that I should know about?

Just set up a Jumpstart install server on another machine and patch the
kernel there.  That way you can netboot and if everything goes kaboom all
you've lost is a few minutes of uptime.  Set up a spare slice to do the OS
install on if you want to have both OS' bootable and the ability to
quickly revert.

You will have to patch twice for the install.  Once on the image you're
booting from (either netboot in Tools/Boot/kernel/genunix, booting kdb or
burning a modified CD) and once on the kernel image that's actually
installed from SUNWcar.  You can of course patch both ahead of time.  You
will also have to repatch after the application of any patch that touches
genunix.

-James

--
James Lockwood
Guy on Summer Vacation (dot-com bombed)
http://www.foonly.com/resume/