[K42-discussion] Problem with thinwire3

[David Tam]

On Wed, 28 Sep 2005, Kevin Cormier wrote:
> Hi everyone,
> 
> I'm a student in the CS department at U of T, and for quite awhile I'd 
> been trying to boot K42 for the first time on an Xserve, but I was 
> running into problems with thinwire3.
> 
> The problem was solved by using an older copy of thinwire3 (timestamped 
> April 12th) that the ECE department here uses, so I think there may be a 
> problem with newer versions, at least for Apple G5 Xserves.
> 
> I'm going to try to pinpoint which revision of 
> tools/build/shared/thinwire/thinwire-src/thinwire3.c causes the 
> problems, and I'll follow up when I'm able to.  I think a likely 
> candidate is the latest revision (1.9), but again I'll have to try it 
> out to be sure.  The comment reads "Reordering of some of the speed 
> re-negotiation code.  Make sure things are done in the right sequence.  
> Add a signal handler on SIGINT to clean-up -- eventually we may want to 
> hook some other stuff off this."  Most of the other changes seem minor.


Hi Kevin.

I have a wild guess as to what the problem could be.
The key words that caught my attention were "April 12th".
I looked through some of my previous notes & emails 
and found perhaps some useful information for you.

April 12th was the date that I (along with Adrian & Livio) solved a UofT
K42 booting problem involving thinwire3.  The problem was solved by
modifying a few lines in victims.conf.  Perhaps you may need to make
the same custom mods since I don't think our proposed solution/changes were
accepted back into the IBM K42 CVS tree.

Below (somewhere) is message that I had sent to Michal that describes 
our problem and temporary solution.



VVVVVVVVVV


Date: Wed, 13 Apr 2005 22:15:42 -0400
From: Michal Ostrowski <mostrows at watson.ibm.com>
To: David Tam <tamda at eecg.toronto.edu>
Subject: Re: Problem with victims.conf

If kvictim resides in /foo/bin, it will look in /foo/bin/../lib for
configuration files.   Have you tried this form of setup?


On Wed, 2005-04-13 at 19:02 -0400, David Tam wrote:
> Hi Michal.
> 
> We recently found a problem with recent changes in the victims.conf file.
> We have temporarily fixed our problem but I thought I should let you know
> so that you could possiblly implement a permanent long-term solution.
> 
> ktwd Configuration
> ------------------
> Our ktwd server is configured as you have suggested.
> It is invoked by inetd on port 4242.
> ktwd is run as the user kitchawa.
> 
> Our 3 configuration files consisting of:
> 1. victims.conf
> 2. generic_hw.conf
> 3. toronto.conf
> 
> are placed in the directory ~kitchawa/ and named
> 
> 1. ~kitchawa/.victims.conf
> 2. ~kitchawa/generic_hw.conf
> 3. ~kitchawa/toronto.conf
> 
> 
> Problem
> -------
> There was a problem in the ~kitchawa/.victims.conf file.
> The "compiler"-inserted lines near the bottom of the file did not work
> correctly.
> 
> include generic_hw.conf
> include toronto.conf
> 
> These lines failed to include the specified files because the kvictim.pl
> script that parses the ~kitchawa/.victims.conf file did not use
> ~/kitchawa/ as the current working directory.  Instead, it used the
> current working directory of the kvictim.pl script.
> 
> 
> Solution
> --------
> We modified the above lines to something like:
> 
> include /guest/kitchawa/generic_hw.conf
> include /guest/kitchawa/toronto.conf
> 
> 
> Follow-Up
> ---------
> If you have any questions, please let me know.
> 
> Thanks.
> 
-- 
Michal Ostrowski <mostrows at watson.ibm.com>



-- 
David Tam <tamda at eecg.toronto.edu>
Graduate Student, ECE Dept, University of Toronto
http://www.eecg.toronto.edu/~tamda