40.55 Optima (Vivaldi)

Vivaldi is a basic server with significant disk storage. It is used as a data server for a work group of researchers using a mixture of MS/Windows-2000 and Linux machines.

The base install (8 November 2002) was Debian GNU/Linux 3.0 from the Debian CD-ROM. The NIC (eepro100) was not recognised. The additional IDE CMD680s card were not recognised by kernel 2.4.18.

The main challenge was the fact that the machine had an ASUS P4B533-VM motherboard with on board network interface card. It also had two additional IDE cards (CMD680) for additional disks. This mother board is best supported under kernel 2.4.20 and beyond. The default 2.4.18 installed fine but the CMD680’s were not recognised. Kernel 2.4.19 recognised the CMD680’s but not the on-board IDE so booting was a problem! Kernel 2.4.20 had not been released so a pre-release was compiled (pre11). That worked just fine.

The on-board video was originally run as vesa because XFree86 4.2.1 does not have a driver for the 82845G AGP. See Festival for further details. However, even with newer kernels and XFree86 4.3 (23 March 2004), whenever a users exists from X the screen remains blank forever! Seems to require a reboot

Grub was installed but this resulted in a strange error:

  root (hd0,0)
  Filesystem type is ext2fs, partition type 0x83
  kernel /Vmlinuz-2.4.20-pre11-p4 ro root=
  [Linux-bzImage, setup=0x1400, size=0x10ea0d]

  Error 28: Selected item cannot fit into memory

Reverting to lilo fixed the problem! However, at a later stage (27 June 2003) a new kernel was installed (kernel-image-2.4.21-1-686) and the next reboot stopped at LIL. To recover the system it was booted from a Debian CD using a rescue kernel:

  linux: rescbf24 root=/dev/hda1

Lilo could not be fixed easily so instead grub was again installed, and worked just fine.

Another problem is that on occasions the power up gets no further than checking the first IDE and reporting . This is well before Linux even comes in to play and seems to indicate some serious hardware problem.

40.55.1 Vivaldi Specification

Key Value
CPU Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 CPU 2.00GHz
BogoMIPS 4023.91
RAM 512MB
Disk 80GB ST380021A, ATA DISK drive (/dev/hda)
80GB ST380021A, ATA DISK drive (/dev/hdd)
60GB ST360021A, ATA DISK drive (/dev/hde)
80GB ST380021A, ATA DISK drive (/dev/hdf)
60GB ST360021A, ATA DISK drive (/dev/hdg)
60GB ST360021A, ATA DISK drive (/dev/hdh)
(/dev/hdj)
CD-ROM ATAPI-CD ROM-DRIVE-52MAX, ATAPI CD/DVD-ROM drive (/dev/hdb)
NIC Intel Corp. 82801BD PRO/100 VE (CNR)(eepro100)
Video Intel 845G Chipset 82845G/GL Brookdale-G (i810)
Audio Intel ICH4 AC’97 codec (i810_audio)

The lspci command gives:

00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corp.: Unknown device 2560 (rev 01)
00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corp.: Unknown device 2562 (rev 01)
00:1d.0 USB Controller: Intel Corp.: Unknown device 24c2 (rev 01)
00:1d.1 USB Controller: Intel Corp.: Unknown device 24c4 (rev 01)
00:1d.2 USB Controller: Intel Corp.: Unknown device 24c7 (rev 01)
00:1d.7 USB Controller: Intel Corp.: Unknown device 24cd (rev 01)
00:1e.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corp. 82801BA/CA PCI Bridge (rev 81)
00:1f.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corp.: Unknown device 24c0 (rev 01)
00:1f.1 IDE interface: Intel Corp. 82801DB ICH4 IDE (rev 01)
00:1f.5 Multimedia audio controller: Intel Corp.: Unknown device 24c5 (rev 01)
01:08.0 Ethernet controller: Intel Corp.: Unknown device 103a (rev 81)
01:09.0 RAID bus controller: CMD Technology Inc PCI0680 (rev 01)
01:0b.0 RAID bus controller: CMD Technology Inc PCI0680 (rev 01)

40.55.2 Vivaldi Install

Spec Details
Hostname vivaldi
Address 155.229.8.158
Netmask 255.255.255.192
Broadcast optional
Gateway 155.229.8.190
DNS 125.83.72.1
Domain togaware.com

For information on the AGP see http://support.intel.com/support/graphics/linux/graphics.htm and http://www.xfree86.org/~dawes/845driver.html.

40.55.3 Install Kernel 2.4.20

Two IDE controllers (Silicon Image CMD680) were installed delivering disks /dev/hde, /dev/hdg, /dev/hdh, and /dev/hdj.

At the time of installing the CMD680 IDE controller chip kernel 2.4.19 was available as a Debian package but had did not recognise the IDE card on the motherboard. Kernel 2.4.20 fixed this, but was not released nor available for Debian. A kernel was compiled from source and patched up to 2.4.20-pre11. The default (i.e., starting from no file) was the starting point. Below is recorded the specific configurations added.

  # cd /usr/src
  # wget http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v2.4/linux-2.4.19.tar.gz
  # wget http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v2.4/testing/patch-2.4.20-pre11.gz
  # tar zxvf linux-2.4.19.tar.gz
  # cd linux-2.4.19
  # gzip -dc ../patch-2.4.20-pre11.gz | patch -p1 -N -F4
  # make menuconfig
    Processor type and features
        Processor family
            CONFIG_MPENTIUM4=y
    General
            CONFIG_APM=y
            CONFIG_APM_DO_ENABLE=y
            CONFIG_APM_CPU_IDLE=y
            CONFIG_APM_DISPLAY_BLANK=y
            CONFIG_APM_RTC_IS_GMT=y
    Block devices
        RAM disk support
            CONFIG_BLK_DEV_RAM=y
        Initial RAM disk (initrd) support
            CONFIG_BLK_DEV_INITRD=y
    ATA/IDE/MFM/RLL support
        IDE, ATA and ATAPI Block devices
            CONFIG_BLK_DEV_CMD64X=y
            CONFIG_BLK_DEV_CMD680=y
    Sound
            CONFIG_SOUND_ICH=y
  # make-kpkg clean
  # make-kpkg --append-to-version -p4 --revision dha01 
              --initrd kernel_image
  # cd .. 
  # wajig install kernel-image-2.4.19-p4_dha01_i386.deb

This works just fine and all standard drivers (CDROM and NFS and EEPRO100) were included by default. The resulting kernel is quite a bit smaller that the kernels supporting lots of hardware (700K initrd cf 2.4MB and 56K modules cf 20MB)!



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