Alright - a bit more on this. I burned the LiveCD, and booted from it. The introwhatever says: "Sun Ultra 5/10 UPA/PCI (UltraSPARC-IIi 360MHz), Keyboard Present OpenBoot 3.19, 128 MB (50 ns) memory installed, Serial #12670108." and the ethernet address and host ID. then "Rebooting with command: boot cdrom Boot device: /pci@1f,0/pci@1,1/ide@3/cdrom@2,0:f File and args: SILO Version 1.4.4 \ -- Welcome to Gentoo SPARC Linux -- -- Version 2004.1 -- boot: gentoo-2.4 Allocated 8 Megs of memory at 0x40000000 for kernel Loaded kernel version 2.4.25 Loading initial ramdisk (943758 bytes at 0x40C00000)... Illegal Instruction ok" It has done this repeatedly, with two flavours of LiveCD (minimal and universal) I tried searching the bugs, and the forums, but found no succour. The only other reference I have seen is linked above, and refers to the same problem with a Debian installation. I have also inquired on the forums: http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?p=1269045#1269045 Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. Attempt to boot from LiveCD 2. 3. Actual Results: "Illegal instruction" produced, drop out of bootup. Expected Results: Offered a linux login. Unfortunately I have no spare CD drives, so cannot try swapping them about. There are some other old Suns in my lab, though; I will try and get permission to try the LiveCD on them (although I am busy at the moment - this may be a while).
This is basically the same as bug #50256 - SILO 1.4.x being bad on some ultras. There's a workaround ISO in the bug that should work just fine on those machines, based on SILO 1.3.2. Also please try to bump OBP (akin to PC BIOS) to 3.31 if possible since it's known to have fixed this issue in many cases for u5/10 users: http://sunsolve.sun.com/pub-cgi/retrieve.pl?patchid=106121&collection=fpatches&mode=results *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 50256 ***
The older SILO worked fine. Thank you!
