Dell M600 Blade: 6.4 works, 7.x and 8.x fail to boot

[Peter Beckman]

On Sat, 14 Nov 2009, Thierry Herbelot wrote:

> Le Friday 13 November 2009, Peter Beckman a écrit :
>> I've been scratching my head all day on an issue that's been frustrating.
>>
>> I've got two FreeBSD 6.2 instances installed on two M600 blades, and am
>> moving to a new datacenter with M600 blades and trying to install FreeBSD
>> 7.2 or 8.  But as others on this list and elsewhere have mentioned,
>> seemingly without resolution, is that it doesn't work.
>>
>>
>> http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-hackers/2009-July/029147.html
>> http://forums.freebsd.org/showthread.php?t=486
>>
>> I was able to install 6.4 on it today, but I'm still at a loss as to why
>> 7.x and even 8.x will not.  Did the architecture change in such a way that
>> it could no longer support M600 blades?  Did someone leave something out of
>> the standard ISO kernel?  Am I not doing it right?
>>
>> Happy to pass along my dmesg.boot;
>
> from the two URLs you provide, it seems that i386 is working (for all FreeBSD
> versions) and only amd64 is failing : can you confirm this ?
>
> then, one of the first steps would be a the dmesg of both a succeeding and a
> failing kernels (verbose !)

  I tried the bootonly ISOs for 7.x and 8.x, both amd64 and i386, all of
  which fail to boot on the Dell M600.

  I was able to boot the bootonly 6.4 ISO, install via the net, and a friend
  suggested I try binary updating.  I have been able to binary update to
  7.0-RELEASE thus far.  I'm trying to get to 8.0-RC3 via binary update now,
  and will report back.

  I believe the issue is not with FreeBSD but the bootonly ISO.  It could
  also be a problem with the other ISOs, I'm not yet sure.

> PS : is there any more recent version of the Dell BIOS ?

  According to the iDRAC, the firmware 2.2.3 reported as installed is what
  Dell reports as the latest version (August 2009).

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Peter Beckman                                                  Internet Guy
beckman at angryox.com                                 http://www.angryox.com/
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