Re: SPARCstation's power led goes off upon kernel init

M.Brands (shrike@il.fontys.nl)
Thu, 10 Jun 1999 03:13:11 +0200


On Wed, Jun 09, 1999 at 07:46:58PM -0500, Chris Frost allegedly wrote:
> I have a SparcStation 2 (sun4c, running debian 2.1, with libc6 2.1.1) and
> upon booting a 2.2 (2.2.9 in this case) kernel the power led on the
> machine goes off during the kernel init (at the same instance as the three
> keyboard led's flash). This problem does not appear with 2.0.35, just 2.2
> kernels. Upon asking if the similar had happend to others I received
> several replies from people running on various sparc variations (at least
> sun4c and sun4m, running debian 2.1, redhat 5.2, and redhat 6.0) that this
> was occuring to their boxen running 2.2 kernels. Finally, someone noted
> that this has been a problem since ~2.1.111, and just has never been
> fixed. Is this true? Is there a real reason that this hasn't been fixed,
> or has no one working on sparc explicits noticed this? I just find this
> really strange (I wouldn't have even thought the kernel could control
> the power led, but I guess that it can).
>
> Thanks for any pointers!

Why should this be a problem or a bug? I used to run NetBSD on a SS5-170
and you could get the LED to indicate the load! Blink once a second for
a load between 0-1, once every two seconds for a load between 1-2, etc.

Pretty cool, if you ask me. They probably just changed the code the drives
the LED.

Btw. I don't have that SS5-170 anymore, so I can't test anything. Also,
Linux never did run very well on the Fujitsu CPU that box has...

Mathijs

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