The 2005 SHARE presentation Conner noted makes the issues much clearer
for those of us who have never worked with FCP channels on z-boxes:
SCSI I/O using QDIO over FCP channels requires not a 2-byte device
address but all sorts of parameters to establish the I/O connections,
and Feature FC9904 appears to add code to the SE and HMC to add
additional panels to allow for enabling SCSI IPL and supplying all the
new parameters required to initiate the I/O. It also talks about FCP
SCSI IPL support being added to zVM V4.4, but even if you had zVM, you
would still have to be able to IPL zVM first, which if you only had SCSI
drives over FCP would seem to also require FC9904.
The sysload tool mentioned sounds like code that runs under z
architecture, not code that runs on the SE. That suggests it in this
case would also have to be installed on a SCSI drive and you would then
have the same problem trying to IPL it.
I'm puzzled as to how a load/IPL was initiated on the z890 to install
CentOS for system z on a SCSI drive. That suggests you have some way to
initiate a load from a source other than FCP SCSI. If so, perhaps there
is hope for using a similar technique to load a bootstrap loader that
then loads from SCSI. My brief search attempts found conflicting info
on whether there is CentOS support for z-architecture platforms, but
perhaps I just didn't find the correct sites.
Joel C. Ewing
On 12/05/2015 06:50 AM, Mike Schwab wrote:
> http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/linux390/sysload.html
> Will this install on the HMC disk? Then start the Linux on the SCSI SAN?
>
> On Fri, Dec 4, 2015 at 11:27 PM, Connor Krukosky
> <conn...@connorsdomain.com> wrote:
>> On 12/4/2015 11:26 PM, Tony Harminc wrote:
>>> Your box has a floppy drive? Really?
>> The SE does yes.
>>> Just so I'm clear... Your z890 plugs in to your SCSI disk box, but it
>>> won't
>>> IPL from it? That is, these are separate features? If I have this right,
>>> then it should be possible to write a small program that could, at worst,
>>> be keyed in to storage. This program would then perform the I/O
>>> instructions to emulate the SCSI IPL. Sort of like the way VM emulates IPL
>>> in a virtual machine. Well maybe this is just what FC 9904 does...
>>>
>> So let me explain how everything is attached:
>> I have an old HP SCSI hard drive array attached to a SAN Data Gateway model
>> 2108-G07.
>> Then I have that go into a SAN switch via SW FCP connection SAN switch is
>> model 2005-b16.
>> Finally I have a LW fiber SFP in one of the ports of the SAN switch which
>> then goes into the mainframe through a FICON-LX module.
>> The FICON port is configured as an FCP interface in the IOCDS.
>>
>> I am not sure how one would go about writing such code as I am so new to all
>> this but I will say that it sounds feasible...
>> I just came across this though:
>> http://linuxvm.org/present/SHARE104/S9259vs.pdf
>> Which mentions some tools specifically "zipl" which sounds like it may
>> be-able to help me?
>> Found it available to download here along with quite a few other tools:
>> https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/linux390/s390-tools-overview.html
>>
>> I must get to bed now and will be out this weekend, but I will definitely
>> look into this late next week after my finals at college.
>>
>> -Connor K
>>
>>
>>
>>
--
Joel C. Ewing, Bentonville, AR jcew...@acm.org
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