[Beowulf] Anybody here still use SystemImager?
David Mathog
mathog at caltech.edu
Wed Feb 27 18:08:34 PST 2019
Joe Landman wrote:
>
> I've never used system imager or Boel, so I can't necessarily comment
> on
> how to fix that. I can point out though, that the project I built
> (https://github.com/joelandman/nyble) turns your standard CentOS7,
> Debian9, or Ubuntu18.04 distro into a PXE (or USB or local disk)
> bootable RAMdisk mounted system. I used this (previous versions of
> this) at Scalable Informatics to boot/run infrastructure we shipped.
I'm about 98% of the way there now, with a mashup of parts from boel and
Centos 7.
The initrd is pretty large though.
Wasted most of a day on a mysterious issue with "sh" (busybox) not
responding to the keyboard with a 3.10.108 kernel built starting from
the boel config, but it would respond using the same initrd and a stock
Centos 7 kernel. So 3.10.108 was recompiled with the Centos 7 config
(which makes WAY too many modules for an initrd) with the network
drivers built into the kernel. This fixes that problem but I could not
tell you why.
The last thing to overcome is that in this environment the SATA disk is
not seen/mounted, even though tty* and numerous other things are.
modprobe sd_mod
puts sd_mod in lsmod, but no /dev/sd* show up. Hardware detection in
Linux has been done and redone so many times I have no idea what to use
in a 3.*.* kernel, and the web is littered with descriptions of methods
which no longer work. The lspci from busybox doesn't give device names
for humans, which isn't helping. BOEL used
modules.pcimap for this, and that is one of the things which no longer
exist.
The init script tries to set things up with mdev (not udev) this way:
echo /sbin/mdev > /proc/sys/kernel/hotplug || shellout
/sbin/mdev -s || shellout
which puts a lot of things in /dev, just not the SATA. This is on a
Dell poweredge T110, maybe there is some driver for the SATA controller
which isn't loading.
Thanks,
David Mathog
mathog at caltech.edu
Manager, Sequence Analysis Facility, Biology Division, Caltech
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