A couple of Lenovo workstation oddities

Previous thread: syntax error in xenocara stable code by Siju George on Tuesday, June 2, 2009 - 1:39 am. (2 messages)

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From: Donald Allen
Date: Tuesday, June 2, 2009 - 6:16 am

As I've mentioned in a previous thread, among the machines on which
I'm running OpenBSD 4.5 is a Lenovo Thinkstation S10. 4 cores, 4 Gb
memory, 2 146 Gb SAS disks on an LSI raid controller, arranged as a
raid 0.

Two questions:

1. In the past, running Linux, I've backed this machine up (to a sata
drive in a usb shoebox) by booting a live- or install-cd, the idea
being to have the system completely quiescent during the backup. I've
been absolutely stymied in trying to do the same thing with OpenBSD.
The install45 cd does not have enough sd* devices (the sd0 series
only), so I can't mount both the raid 0 and the backup drive. The two
live cds I tried (bsdanywhere and jggimi) both fail during booting,
complaining they can't find their root filesystem. In order to get any
flavor of OpenBSD to boot on this machine, I have to get into ukc and
disable uhci. Thinking that might be causing this problem, I tried the
jggimi livecd on my Thinkpad X61 (2 64-bit cores) both just letting it
boot and doing the ukc->disable uhci sequence. In both cases, the
system booted successfully (no problem finding the root file system on
the ramdisk). Hopefully temporarily, I've worked around this problem
on the workstation by booting the installed system and backing it up
while it's running, shutting down some key things (e.g., postgresql).
But I would like to solve this problem one way or another and be able
to boot enough of a system from a cd to be able to run my backup
script.

2. If I boot the install45 cd (bsd.rd) on the workstation (after
disabling uhci in ukc) and run reboot from the shell, the system
reboots normally. If I boot the installed kernel (bsd.mp) and run
reboot from the shell, the system powers down briefly and then comes
back up and reboots. OpenBSD does not behave this way on the two
Thinkpads on which I have it installed. Nor have I seen this behavior
with Linux or FreeBSD that I had run previously on the workstation. I
did get into the bios setup at one point, to see if there ...
From: Vadim Zhukov
Date: Tuesday, June 2, 2009 - 7:18 am

You can freely create additional devices:

# cd /etc && sh MAKEDEV sd1

For the rest of your mail - it's not clear, did you tried -CURRENT? I 
remember there were some commits related to X38...

-- 
  Best wishes,
    Vadim Zhukov

A: Because it messes up the order in which people normally read text.
Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing?
A: Top-posting.
Q: What is the most annoying thing in e-mail?

From: Donald Allen
Date: Tuesday, June 2, 2009 - 11:49 am

I have not tried -CURRENT. I'll check the cvs logs to see if I can
find anything that seems relevant.


From: Vadim Zhukov
Date: Tuesday, June 2, 2009 - 2:17 pm

I'll recommend you to try it anyway. If it'll help then you can find a 
fix in CVS; if it will not then developers may pay attention to your 
problem; they do not care much about something already fixed, unless it 
is considered critical.

-- 
  Best wishes,
    Vadim Zhukov

A: Because it messes up the order in which people normally read text.
Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing?
A: Top-posting.
Q: What is the most annoying thing in e-mail?

From: David Vasek
Date: Tuesday, June 2, 2009 - 7:23 am

Why not use a single-user mode ( -s from boot prompt) for this?

I am not the one able to help with this, but the dmesg output 
(/var/run/dmesg.boot) is almost always needed. Look at the section 
'Reporting Bugs' in the FAQ first. Also, check with Lenovo if there are 
any bios updates available.

Btw, do you experience the uhci troubles under OpenBSD/i386 (you forgot to 
mention here that you are running amd64)? Booting i386 bsd.rd should be 
enough to test. Maybe this comparison could be helpful.

Regards,
David

From: Donald Allen
Date: Tuesday, June 2, 2009 - 11:51 am

Good idea -- I'll try it.


Previous thread: syntax error in xenocara stable code by Siju George on Tuesday, June 2, 2009 - 1:39 am. (2 messages)

Next thread: Re: Wireless help, please by Stuart Henderson on Tuesday, June 2, 2009 - 10:00 am. (5 messages)