[suse-sparc] Booting Blade 2000 "not enough memory"

From: Greg Newby (gbnewby_at_ils.unc.edu)
Date: Wed Aug 21 2002 - 05:21:56 CEST

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From: Greg Newby <gbnewby@ils.unc.edu>
Message-ID: <20020821032155.GE7432@ils.unc.edu>
Subject: [suse-sparc] Booting Blade 2000 "not enough memory"

    I'm not having any luck getting SuSE Sparc Linux 7.3's installation CD
    booting on my Blade 2000 Anniversary Edition.

    The list archives
    (http://lists.suse.com/archive/suse-sparc/2002-Mar/0241.html) mention
    someone who managed to find a kludge for his E450 for this problem
    (booting Solaris first to initialize memory, then rebooting to Linux).
    Not a great solution, and didn't work for me since my system wants to
    power cycle when going from a running Solaris to "boot cdrom ...".

    I saw that the release notes say the Blade 1000 is supported (and
    Blade 100) but doesn't mention the 2000. Well, it's new, so I'm
    trying.

    The symptom: I try booting from the "ok" prompt with something like:
      ok boot cdrom /boot/vmlinuz64 mem=1024M initrd=/boot/initrd64.small

    SILO runs and the SuSE Linux/SPARC 7.3 menu displays, then

      Uncompressing image...
      Could not find any available memory for initial ramdisk
      Fatal error: You do not have enough continuous available memory for such initial ramdisk.
      Program terminated

    I've tried variations (smaller/bigger/no memory arg, no initrd
    arg...). I've checked through the kernel source & kernel mailing list
    archives to see if there is any particular limitation with the amount
    of RAM in a machine, but it's inconclusive where the limitation or
    problem lies.

    The system is a Blade 2000 Anniversary Edition with 8GB of RAM and 2
    UltraSPARC-III+ CPUs.

    Any suggestions would be welcome, including "this just doesn't work"
    or "you need a newer kernel". I'd like to try a different distro, too,
    but none of the other sparc64 distros have an easy-to-try CD image
    (the Blade doesn't have a floppy drive).

    Thanks....Greg
    gbnewby@ils.unc.edu http://ils.unc.edu/gbnewby 

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