chomsky.mayfirst.org

chomsky is an Apple 1U rackmount Xserve, dual processor 1GHz PowerPC.

It uses OpenFirmware through the on-board serial port, which defaults to 57600bps, 8n1

While Chomsky has 3 PCI slots available, they all appear to be 3.3V PCI slots. Based on ​the physical keying of the card, it looks like the Octopus-550 requires a 5V PCI slot, so it won't fit in any of the sockets.

There are several 3.3V PCI multiport serial cards available, including a ​16-port card for $422.

I'm not sure what else we can do with this machine.

Since it has no graphics card, and ​ofboot (the typical first-stage bootloader) tries to force output to the graphics card, the standard boot process fails.

This is resolved by telling Open Firmware to bypass ofboot entirely, and go straight to yaboot. This is done by setting the nvram this way:

0 roy:~# nvram --print-config=boot-device
hd:2,yaboot
0 roy:~# 

So the boot process (from the serial line) looks like this during a healthy boot:

Apple RackMac1,1 4.4.4f1 BootROM built on 06/22/02 at 00:22:19
Copyright 1994-2002 Apple Computer, Inc.
All Rights Reserved.

Welcome to Open Firmware, the system time and date is: 23:23:44 08/06/2008

To continue booting, type "mac-boot" and press return.
To shut down, type "shut-down" and press return.

 ok
0 > boot load-size=24948 adler32=2a9e7dac 

Loading ELF


Config file read, 620 bytes

Welcome to yaboot version 1.3.13
Enter "help" to get some basic usage information
boot: Linux
Please wait, loading kernel...
   Elf32 kernel loaded...
Loading ramdisk...
ramdisk loaded at 01a00000, size: 7326 Kbytes
OF stdout device is: /pci@f2000000/pci-bridge@d/mac-io@7/escc@13000/ch-a@13020
command line: console=ttyS0,9600 console=tty0
memory layout at init:
  alloc_bottom : 02128000
  alloc_top    : 20000000
  alloc_top_hi : 20000000
  rmo_top      : 20000000
  ram_top      : 20000000
Looking for displays