Re: Build farm down / building fuloong farms (was: Re: [loongson-buildfarm] build farm down ?)

[Philippe Vachon]

Hi Daniel,

WRT the serial port for the Fuloongs, it's a male DE9 connector on one end, and 
a 3-pin female 2mm connector on the other end. You require a null modem cable 
to connect to it, however. As I recall, PMON will output its debug messages via 
the serial port by default, but I haven't tried actually configuring the 
Fuloong from the RS232 port.

I've uploaded a photo of the connector at 
http://lebesgue.cowpig.ca/~philippe/fuloong_rs232.jpg, in case that helps.

As a side note, I think deblobbing PMON will be fairly simple -- just delete 
the file with the VGA BIOS code in it (vgarom.c in the Bonito directory, under 
Targets) in it and then disable the config option that enables VGA output 
(probably commenting out 'select mod_vgacon' in the Bonito config will be 
enough, but I haven't tried). 

Cheers,
Phil

On 2010-02-14, at 11:01 AM, Daniel Clark wrote:

> On Sun, Feb 14, 2010 at 10:36 AM, Rob Savoye <address@hidden> wrote:
>> I can't seem to access the build farm, is it down or a routing problem ?
> 
> I can't get to it either at the moment. It is Chinese Spring Festival
> at the moment, so I don't know if anyone from Lemote will be around
> until the 22nd, but cc:ing lemote list just in case.
> 
> If Lemote can't get it back up soon, and it would be useful, I can see
> about getting people user accounts on the US-based
> loongson2f-1.gnewsense.org machine temporarily.
> 
> I should have around 10 fuloongs in the US in 3-4 weeks, many of which
> will be put in a build farm configuration.
> 
> I believe I recall that PMON either automatically also uses the serial
> port on the fuloong or can easily be made to do so; is that correct?
> 
> Also, could someone with a fuloong tell me what the gender of the DB9
> end of the supplied serial cable is, if it has screws or bolts on the
> sides, and if you need a null modem adapter to connect to another
> computer?
> 
> I'm planning to not use the VGA on the fuloong due to the VGA BIOS
> blob in PMON; eventually I'm going to look into removing the blob from
> PMON completely.
> 
> Reason for using it instead of yeeloong for this application is just
> that it is significantly less expensive, and also it has an
> easily-accessible serial port which should make managing large numbers
> of them easier.
> 
> Specifically I'm planning on using one of them as a console server, using:
> http://www.conserver.com/ ,
> http://www.dealextreme.com/details.dx/sku.33189 and
> ( http://www.dealextreme.com/details.dx/sku.5859 or
> http://www.dealextreme.com/details.dx/sku.9181 ) depending on the
> answer to the "screws or bolts" question.
> 
> I'm not planning on doing remote power at this moment, but if anyone
> knows of an inexpensive way of doing that I'd love to hear about it.
> Using X10 stuff is a possibility, but maybe too hackish :)
> 
> Happy Hacking,
> -- 
> Daniel JB Clark | Free Software Activist | http://pobox.com/~dclark
>