NetBSD/distrib/notes/sgimips/prep

.\"	$NetBSD: prep,v 1.4 2002/07/15 12:48:01 rafal Exp $
.
First and foremost, before beginning the installation process,
.Em make sure you have a reliable backup
of any data (e.g., an old IRIX installation) you wish to preserve.
.Pp
Booting
.Nx*M
for the first time is most commonly done from the network.
You must set up DHCP, TFTP, and possibly NFS for the installation
procedure to be successful.
Some SGI bootproms, such as the ones found on O2s, can read
ELF kernels directly from the network, others require that you boot
an ECOFF version of the kernel.
You will notice this from the following message from PROM:
.Pp
.Dl Illegal f_magic number 0x7f45, expected MIPSELMAGIC or MIPSEBMAGIC.
.Pp
You can convert the standard ELF
format kernel into an ECOFF kernel using the
.Pa elf2ecoff
tool.
.Pp
Different SGI hardware will require the executable code in the loadable
image to start at a different address.
You must decide which image your system is capable of loading.
The current options are:
.(bullet
Indigo2, Indy, Challenge M, Challenge S
.It
O2
.bullet)
.Pp
Additionally there may be a third type in the future for 64bit machines.
From now on this document assumes you are familiar with selecting the
correct image for your system.
.Pp
Note that some older bootproms have an interesting bug in reading the
kernel via TFTP.
They handle the port number as a signed entity, and
can thus not connect to ports >32767.
You can work around this problem on the TFTP server
(given that it is a NetBSD host) by using
.Dq sysctl
to set
.Dq net.inet.ip.anonportmin
and
.Dq net.inet.ip.anonportmax
to more suitable values.
.Pp
The O2 internal MACE Ethernet chip isn't supported yet, so to boot the O2
and mount nfsroot, you will need an external NIC in the PCI slot.