[vvuk]

Does anyone have any info on how a NL4R (yes 4) is meant to be reflashed/upgraded?  Is the only way really across a Numalink connection, from a compute brick (via flashsc using the local system controller, targeting a particular brick)?  I have a NL4R with an ancient L1. It might even be a pre-release L1 (I have image versions 1.49.0cce66 and 1.490cce67!). I'm trying to get the latest 1.62.1 (latest internal diags, for Altix; for MIPS latest is 1.48.1 still) on there.

Is it possible to do a L1 flash _through_ or _from_ an L2, in other configs? Or is a L2 only useful for broadcasting commands / setting serial numbers / etc? Because right now I think my only option is to figure out how to get the right image that I can manually write using mtd_debug on the device itself. Thankfully there are two image slots, so I should have a safe way to test anything out, but I can't figure out how to match the image format that is in the sysco l1.bin with what's actually written to the block device.

Along the way I've learned a few things:

1. flashsc / l1cmd will ignore most of the --dev, --serial, etc. arguments if they're run on a host that has a hardware SC (i.e. any IP35 mips box where /hw/module/*/L1/controller exists). It will always talk to that SC. This might be intentional, or it might be a bug; however, it can be patched by just changing one instruction to a nop in flashsc (latest MIPS flashsc @ VMA 0x10027644). With that, flashsc will properly attempt to communicate using a serial port with --dev /dev/ttydN, or via serial network console via --serial host:port.

The connection setup seems to consist of sending a ^X and expecting a ^X in return. I haven't tried via flashsc, but sending my O350's L1 a ^X caused it to jump into a different mode. Note that this means that we may be able to flash ip35 machines without booting them into IRIX (L1, not PROM that I can see anyway). I'll verify that at some point.

However, the L1 on my NR4L throws an exception when it gets a ^X.

2. You can extract a single image from a flashsc multi-image (e.g. when flashsc -vv shows more than one) just by copying out the data from the offset that -vv shows to the next offset (or end). Doing so and running flashsc -vv on the result shows that it sees it as a "version 3" image, instead of a "version 4" multi-image. (The single-target L2 images are all version 3.)

3. A NL4R has a serial port and a USB port. It's running a very stripped down Linux. The serial port gets you access to a root prompt; the USB port only seems to support two circa-2005 USB-Ethernet dongles: a Pegasus/Pegasus2 or Realtek rtl5180 (likely 0/1/2; _not_ 3) chipset ones. Nothing else seems to work, not even USB-Serial; all drivers were stripped out of the kernel.

4. The image does have pppd. It's possible to set up pppd on the console port and connect it to the rest of the world that way; you need to first "sysctl -w kernel.printk='0 4 1 0'" to stop random kernel messages from showing up on the console, then create a script with "while true ; do /usr/sbin/pppd /dev/console 38400 192.168.200.10:192.168.200.20 crtscts ; done" and exec it. Then configure a pppd in "quiet" mode (in/out) on the other end with those IPs.

[Raion]

For those confused, a NL4R is a NumaLink4 Router, used on the A350 and other gen-1 Itanium products.

I ran such a cluster, but without an N4LR so I'm afraid I don't particularly know the answer. (IIRC you can run 4 of them without a router)

[vvuk]

Was it necessary to move this thread to the Itanium forum, where noone is likely to see it?  My questions about flashsc were generic, not Altix-specific, and had useful information regarding IP35 hardware.

[weblacky]

While I know nothing about this, googling "NL4R firmware upgrade" seems to bring up techpubs related to updating the firmware suggests using the Linux L3 software to perform this. Also claims warnings of needing to heed bulletins (who knows if those are around) on upgrading from older firmware due to serial and security features added later. Seem like maybe a bit of a process.

[Raion]

I did not mean to upset you by moving the thread here.

The reason why I moved the thread is because the specific issue is related to Altix hardware. I don't want people jerking your chain with replies about MIPS systems which at worst may be inaccurate and brick something. By putting it in the Itanium section you're going to get specific responses.

I appreciate that you sprinkled in information about IP35/Chimera systems and I'll get that into our wiki, but the lion share is specific to NRL4.


Did you have a better suggestion for us to handle dealing with the lesser known systems? My biggest concern has been creating confusion by mixing categories for systems of vastly different construction and operating systems, not to mention hardware no?

If your concern is related to the lack of contrast in our grayscale theming making the other categories less eye catching, we do have alternative color schemes you can pick from the User CP Options and many people take advantage of that.

If in the future we had a case for specific categories for itanium or vws sgi systems I would be happy to add them, but as it stands we don't have that level of activity surrounding those systems.

In order to help assist you I have messaged a number of users here who may have closer authority on the NRL4.

I or any of the other staff members here are very open to suggestions. Send one of us a message if you have any further questions, requests or you can start a thread in Site Discussion so we can tackle your concerns further.

[Raion]

Apologies for the double post but I also wanted to point your attention since Weblacky brought it up to the L3 stuff in question.

http://ftp.irixnet.org/sgi-tools/l3-emul...nux.tar.gz

You probably need one of those ancient Red hat Linux versions. Yes, before RHEL. I'm not on the up-and-up with specifics.

[vvuk]

In case anyone ever finds this thread while looking for anything related --

- L3 & associated RPMs (I used IST 3.24, not sure what's in the l3-emulator-linux tarball) install fine in RHEL 7 (the i386 alt-arch build of RHEL7; install ksh manually first).
- flashsc --l2 blah works fine to remotely update the image on the NL4R (or elsewhere presumably), even across my hacky ppp link. So the IRIX tools are too old to understand the newer brick, or they kept getting confused by the local system controller despite my hackery

[fleedwood]

http://ftp.irixnet.org/sgi-tools/l3-emul...nux.tar.gz

the file looks truncated:

CD/
CD/install
CD/snxsc_l3-1.62.0-1.i386.rpm
CD/snxsc_firmware-1.62.1-1.i386.rpm
star: Tar file too small (amount: 0 bytes).
star: Unexpected EOF on input.
star: Cannot recover from error - exiting.
star: 2588 blocks + 8192 bytes (total of 26509312 bytes = 25888.00k).

Has anybody the complete archive ?

[Raion]

So it's broken? Shoot. I'll take a proper archive.

- L3 & associated RPMs (I used IST 3.24, not sure what's in the l3-emulator-linux tarball) install fine in RHEL 7 (the i386 alt-arch build of RHEL7; install ksh manually first).
- flashsc --l2 blah works fine to remotely update the image on the NL4R (or elsewhere presumably), even across my hacky ppp link. So the IRIX tools are too old to understand the newer brick, or they kept getting confused by the local system controller despite my hackery

Shit I missed this

So the L3 emulator software installs on i386 RHEL fine? I had no idea of course, but the common thread was that associated drivers don't work in a 2.6+ kernel iirc.