Hello, Im new to the forum and have
I'm trying to setup a Power4 7028-6E4 (630) that was donated to my school. It seems that there is a lack of support for the system, now that it is quite aged. My objective is to upgrade the firmware from the RR02~ version it has now. The only way I can figure to do that (no floppy drive or HMC available) is to use the existing suse (kernel 2.6.5) installation. I have the latest firmware R08~, but I require a few rpm packages to be installed, in order to update the F/W. I am unable to download the proper IBM installation toolkit, as the only one I can find on the site is V4.2, which supports Power5 and up. Does anyone have a link to a proper ISO, or the support tools?
(Platform Enablement library - librtas-32bit)
(Service Aids)
(Hardware Inventory)
Thank you
Topic
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Re: Power4 revival
2011-02-28T20:41:05Z
This is the accepted answer.
This is the accepted answer.
As long as your kernel is recent enough (I believe any release past SLES8 SP3, inclusive, should be fine), you can just run the update_flash command. That command is actually just a script that interacts with procfs interfaces provided by the kernel, so it doesn't have any glibc requirements or anything like that. If update_flash doesn't exist on your system, or on the distro media, you should just be able to grab a copy of the script from a powerpc-utils or ppc64-utils tarball; the version doesn't matter too much, as update_flash hasn't changed in many years. The powerpc-utils tarball here should work fine: http://powerpc-utils.ozlabs.org/
I wrote a brief summary of the firmware update process with Linux on Power several years ago:
http://zombieprocess.wordpress.com/2007/10/12/system-firmware-on-pseries-and-system-p/
Hope that helps!
Mike
