Mark5A upgrade
Guifré Molera - Jan Wagner 12/05/2009
Version in PDF format PDF
Background
During July 2008 we finally planned to upgrade the main components of our Mark5A. As we still wonder which will be future of Mark5 and diskpacks, we decided to keep the old A version and don't get in troubles with Mark5B. The list of electronic components purchased to upgrade Mark5-637 is:
- Motherboard P5NT-WS -
- Intel Q9300 Core2Quad 2.5GHz S775 - 223,60 €
- Matrox G550 PCI-E x1 32MB - 132,75 €
- 2 GB 1066 MHz DDR2 CL5 - 52.15 €
- ALTERNATIVE: Asus P5K WS Intel Chipset P35 - 138.20 €
- Corsair HX1000W ATX - 194.90 € /ul>
- Chelsio 10 Gbps card Dual-CX4
- Addonics 4 x eSATA card ADSA3GPX8-4E CIe x8
Additional devices to further test Mark5A, 10 Gigabit connectivity and diskpack capabilites are:
Obviously we re-used the all Mark5 and StreamStor board.
Installation
The installation plan has been made to create a dual boot system with the official Haystack distribution for Mark5, Debian Etch, and the latest Ubuntu version, Handy 8.04. Main target is to achieve a stable system which can run all VLBI observations without problema and is able to have the latest drivers and Kernels to test S-ATA, 10 Gbps on Mark5. Debian Etch uses a stable 2.6.18.6 Kernel version in which all the latest drivers are not available.
For the current version, the PATA disk has been splitted equally in two partitions. The primary part contains Debian and the secondary Ubuntu. Both of them are planned to be fully usable for Mark5 operations. Kernel option differs a bit between the two parts, Debian Etch is configured for a 2.6.18 kernel while Hardy installation is based in a 2.6.24.
Debian Etch 4.0
It is a true fact trying to install Debian Etch on a PATA disc on the second motherboard and its Marvell chipset available, which it was totally a pain in the ass.
From Haystack sources, we got the instructions and a pack of two cd's. The first contains a basic Debian Etch net installation, release 3. Which set up a basic system for your pc and don't install any extra package. The second cd mark5os_etch_disk2.iso contains the additional debian packages for your installation and mark5 and streamstor drivers.
Additional packages added to the mark5-637 where:
sudo aptitude install pciutils lshw libpci1
Ubuntu Hardy 8.04
In the second partition of the 160 GB disk, we started to install a Ubuntu Hardy Operative System. The main purpose is to have to latest drivers for the motherboard, 10 Gbps board and/or SATA controller. The set-up is similar than the used in Debian, single partition with home and root directory. Swap area is reserved to the 4 Gbps extra available.
Installing Ubuntu after Debian, it messes the grub loader, having the ubuntu one as a master. It can stil be dual bootable and it principle I won't do any change as it's more probable to get kernel updates in Ubuntu than in Debian. After all the updates I will proceed to install the mark5 tools, hoping no errors are found.
sudo dpkg -i streamstor_1.0-i386.deb report errors in the linux_wrapper.c.
linux_wrappers.c: In function 'build_dma_list_26': linux_wrappers.c:1791: error: 'struct scatterlist' has no member named 'page' ... linux_wrappers.c: In function 'LINUX_free_sg_dma': ... linux_wrappers.c:1956: error: 'struct scatterlist' has no member named 'page' make: *** [LINUX.2.6.24-16-generic.i386/linux_wrappers.o] Error 1
We need to attach a patch in the file.
scp linux_wrappers.patch-JW oper@lionel: cp linux_wrappers.patch-jW /usr/local/src/streamstor/linux patch linux_wrappers.c linux_wrappers.patch-JW patching file linux_wrappers.c make make install ./wdreg windrvr6 no [: 31: ==: unexpected operator [: 42: ==: unexpected operator [: 53: ==: unexpected operator
the unexpected operator messages are from the 'wdreg' script.
oper@mark5cpp:~/streamstor/WinDriver/WinDriver/redist$ pico wdreg just change the 1st line #!/bin/sh into #!/bin/bash oper@mark5cpp:~/streamstor/WinDriver/WinDriver/redist$ sudo ./wdreg windrvr6 no cp /usr/local/src/streamstor/linux/util/* /usr/local/bin/streamstor/
Running dpkg -i mark5a_1.0-i386.deb will find a few errors, so you need to install a few extra-packages to compile correctly under Ubuntu.
sudo aptitude install libncurses5-dev libglib2.0-dev libglib1.2-dev g77 gfortran tcsh libreadline5-dev g++-3.4 gcc-3.4
That will make almost full compilation but still it will appear thousand of warnings for the g++ compiler version. To avoid them we link the compilers g++ and gcc to the oldest version 3.4 instead of the current 4.2 (you will need root permissions:
cd /usr/bin/ rm g++ gcc ln -s g++-3.4 g++ ln -s gcc-3.4 gcc Still you will need to fix (if it's not yet done), file /usr/local/bin/marka/cc5A change the first line to #!/bin/bash ./cc5A
Change the /etc/passwd to add tcsh session instead of bash. If each time list a long list of parameters at the beginning, you will need to modify /etc/csh.cshrc and eliminate the duplicate lines.The system should be ready to run mark5A like a charm.