[CentOS] Anyone using CentOS 6 on PC104 stacks?

Denniston, Todd A CIV NAVSURFWARCENDIV Crane todd.denniston at navy.mil
Wed Jul 23 20:06:23 UTC 2014


> -----Original Message-----
> From: Lamar Owen [mailto:lowen at pari.edu]
> Sent: Saturday, July 19, 2014 9:28 AM
> To: CentOS mailing list
> Subject: Re: [CentOS] Anyone using CentOS 6 on PC104 stacks?
> 
> On 07/18/2014 05:34 PM, Denniston, Todd A CIV NAVSURFWARCENDIV Crane wrote:
> > Is anyone using CentOS 6 on PC104 stacks?
> > I have tried a couple of different CPU cards with CentOS 6.5 [no updates].  I can install with the Install DVD to the PATA hard drive
> just fine, but they each hang up while the installed system is trying to get UDEV going.   And by "hang up" I mean a) leave the
> machine setting for hours and it never gets udev started, AND b) the keyboard has gone non-responsive (power switch is the only
> way out).
> >
> >
> Todd, can you give us more details on the PC104 CPU hardware?
> Manufacturer and model would be nice, too.
> 
> My only PC104 CPU's here are 486's, and thus C6 is not going to boot (C6
> requires PAE and i686).
> 

Sorry for the delay, I had a couple of other interrupts to deal with.
As can be seen below, both CPU cards include PAE support. Both were running with just the CPU card (with its built-in peripheral interfaces), hard-drive and power supply.
While collecting the information below, I played with kernel options and happened to find that with the 
RTD cme37786hx I could get it to boot reliably from the hard-drive if I included 
" noapic nomodeset udevtrace" (in that order) replacing the "quiet rhgb" *AND* either use the
 CentOS 6.3 install kernel or update to the latest CentOS 6.5 kernel. 
 The CentOS 6.5 DVD installed kernel would pause forever just after trying 'edd'.

As for the VL-EPMs-21b, even though it worked OK in CentOS 5.9, it would always stop in the UDEV 
startup of CentOS 6.5 even after updating to the latest 6.5 kernel and using the above kernel options. Interestingly though while working with it, I noticed a little brown cube on the ESD bench where the 
board had been setting.  Who would think that a missing capacitor might stop a new kernel,
 with a much faster IO engine, from accessing all the hardware in parallel (max power pull) at 
entry into user space? :)  
Beginning to think this one is not CentOS's fault. :) 
Fortunately I am expecting to get a new, not used before I got it, version ... sometime. :)

So I guess it is sort of solved for now.
Thanks for taking  a look.
-----
Drive (320GB) used in both settings
WD3200BEVE
500M boot
1GB swap
minimal install, and using chroot in rescue, added: sos, pciutils, usbutils, ntpdate,  openssh-clients, 
dmidecode, lynx
-----
CPU card #1
Versa Logic Corp (Ocelot)
VL-EPMs-21b
http://www.versalogic.com/oce
Intel Atom Z520, 1.33 GHz
http://ark.intel.com/products/41174/Intel-Atom-Processor-Z520PT-512K-Cache-1_33-GHz-533-MHz-FSB
2GB ram
cpu family	: 6
flags           : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov 
pat clflush dts acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss ht tm pbe nx constant_tsc arch_perfmon pebs bts aperfmperf 
pni dtes64 monitor ds_cpl vmx est tm2 ssse3 xtpr pdcm movbe lahf_lm dts tpr_shadow vnmi flexpriority
----
CPU card #2
RTD cme37786hx
http://www.rtd.com/manuals/archive/archive.htm
http://www.rtd.com/manuals/archive/CME37786HX.pdf  pdf page 14 has specs.
VIA Eden CPU with Twister-T Chipset, 400 MHz to 1 GHz clock speed
500MB ram
flags           : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic mtrr pge mca cmov pse36 mmx fxsr sse up

Even when this disclaimer is not here:
I am not a contracting officer. I do not have authority to make or modify the terms of any contract.





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