Hi vvuk & Weblacky
firstly vvuk, thanks for testing straight jump, that should save others from having to do multiple step updates.
On NVRAM I am aware that there is:
- DALLAS for Serial No, L1 RTC & L1 Config &
- STI for PROM environment and system RTC,
- but it is unconfirmed that the "Bedrock PROM" is also stored in STI chip.
See this discussion thread:
https://forums.irixnet.org/thread-2164-page-7.html
Weblackly has, I think, correctly identified the purpose of the little 512 byte EEPROM for holding the machine serial number.
This make sense as it ensures that you can maintain the machine ID across system board swaps which is important for licensed software, and is pretty much the same as with the Octane, but that usesthe "ID-in-a-Can" chip which looks like a battery.
The reason I am not sure if it the STI chip is that on Tezro and O350 this is on the IO9 board and not the system board and changing the CPU system board on O350 can result in PROM version change (I think, as I have seen this happen but did not really think about underlying cause at the time, so need to re-verify) ... which would not occur if it was on the IO9 board...
On my numalink'ed O350 it reports the PROM version for each chassis as part of boot sequence, so one way to determine if the IO9 has PROM would be to pull out an IO9 board from one of the chassis and see if it still reports a PROM version (currently I have 6 chassis == 6 PROM notifications).
However pulling out machines and boards is lots of work so I have been avoiding doing that in hope that some one else may have better approach.
The reason for looking into this was to see if there is way to change the PROM data (to allow for change in CPU speed), without having to boot into IRIX (as per thread discussion).
Once Weblacky gets his Fuel (which is 700 MHz ??) going then he can do PROM dump on that and it can be put into mix of looking at the data variation across the PROMs based on speed changes.
Cheers from Oz,
jwhat/John
