[jwhat]

Hi Weblacky,

thanks for very thorough answer.

Your feedback on recapping vs replacing Fuel power supply is worth a separate thread…

Back to PROM flashing, I just did re-read of SGI O350 doco (via “Jurassic techpubs” ;-) ) to confirm that Bedrock PROM is on O350 CPU board. My recollection was correct and SGI doco clearly has the Bedrock ASIC as being under the metal cover on the O350 board. So likely the Bedrock PROM is under the cover as well. This is why people cannot see it.

I would be willing to bet a broken / bent SGI system board ;-) , that the little pluggable chip that is common to the Fuel and O350 IO9 board is not the Bedrock PROM. Could this be sitting under one of the big heat sinks on Fuel?

The Bedrock provides the CPU / CPU and memory comes: “Bedrock ASIC (or hub ASIC), which enables communication between the processors, memory, and I/O devices.”

So it would need cooling as much as CPU.

If I had a spare O350 CPU, I would open it up and have a look, but I sold the last spare I had to help fund replacement quad 800.

Another thing to note: Octane also has flashable PROM and does not need to be “re-flashed” like Fuel to accommodate CPU swaps. So I think it’s PROM is also on the CPU module. Unfortunately my Octane is dead due to V12 failure at the moment, but another useful test would be to see if PROM version changes as a result of Octane CPU swap (Octane XBOW switch has similar architecture to O3000 according to old SGI marketing/technical docs). On O350 I have seen PROM change happen a few time when adding new boards / chassis into my numalink’ed O350. It reports different PROM version across chassis on boot and I have had to reflash to bring new board/chassis up to alignment with the rest of them. The flash utility only flashes the chassis that has the older PROM version and leaves the rest untouched.

Anyhow, enough “chewing the fat” on this one.

Cheers from Oz,

jwhat/John