Trying to install the Hurd on SCSI PC

[Christian Mauduit]

Hi,

I'm currently trying to install the GNU/Hurd on my personnal computer,
and I'm experiencing a few problems. Here's what I did
- successfully installed the GRUB
- created a new ext2 partition to host the Hurd
- extracted the latest (today's) "gnu-latest.tar.gz" file from
  ftp://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/grub/contrib/marcus/ in it
- edited /etc/fstab in this partition so that it contains
  ---8<------------------------------------------------------------
  # <file system> <mount point>   <type>  <options> <dump>  <pass>
  /dev/sd1s3      /               ext2    rw 0       1
  #/dev/sd1s4      /home           ext2    rw 0       2
  /dev/sd0s3      none            swap    sw 0       0
  ---8<------------------------------------------------------------
- added the following lines to my /boot/grub/menu.lst config file
  ---8<------------------------------------------------------------
  # For booting the GNU Hurd
  title  GNU/Hurd (single user)
  root   (hd1,2)
  kernel /boot/gnumach.gz -s root=sd1s3
  module /boot/serverboot.gz
  ---8<------------------------------------------------------------
All this has been done on a Debian GNU/Linux Woody system. 

I have 2 SCSI disks on this machine, here's what I get when calling
fdisk -l under GNU/Linux:
---8<------------------------------------------------------------
guenegaud:/home/ufoot# fdisk -l /dev/sda

Disk /dev/sda: 255 heads, 63 sectors, 2231 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 bytes

   Device Boot    Start       End    Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sda1   *         1         6     48163+  83  Linux
/dev/sda2             7      1088   8691165   83  Linux
/dev/sda3          1089      1149    489982+  82  Linux swap
/dev/sda4          1150      2231   8691165   83  Linux
guenegaud:/home/ufoot# fdisk -l /dev/sdb

Disk /dev/sdb: 255 heads, 63 sectors, 527 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 bytes

   Device Boot    Start       End    Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sdb1   *         1       131   1052226    6  FAT16
/dev/sdb2           132       262   1052257+  a5  FreeBSD
/dev/sdb3           263       393   1052257+  83  Linux
/dev/sdb4           394       524   1052257+  83  Linux
---8<------------------------------------------------------------

/dev/sda is normally detected as hd0 by GRUB, and /dev/sdb is hd1.

When I boot the Hurd, things first thing to work out well. I can see on
the console that Hurd seems to be unable to detect IDE drives, and it
spends some time finding out that thee are no drives at all (*) which is
perfectly normal since:
1) - there are no IDE drives on the computer
2) - both Linux and FreeBSD block for a fair anount of seconds when
     querying IDE stuff on my computer

Then Hurd looks like it's detecting hardware, for instance it detects
that there's an NE2000 compatible card:
---8<------------------------------------------------------------
eth0: PCI NE2000 found at 0xa000, IRQ5, 00:80:AD:B7:D0:D5
---8<------------------------------------------------------------

During this I see *no* trace of any detection of my SCSI card, which is
a Tekram DC390U3. Under Linux, this card is handled by the SYM53C8XX
driver. This driver seems to be available for the Hurd, since I found
on: http://www.nongnu.org/thug/gnumach_hardware.html that "NCR 53C8xx"
is a supported SCSI controller. A grep in the GNU Mach source seems to
confirm this.

Then comes the following error:
---8<------------------------------------------------------------
Root device `sd1s3' does not exist!
Root device name? [sd1s3]
---8<------------------------------------------------------------

I tried to put other values thatn sd1s3 (sd0s1,sd6s3,...) but none
worked. My guess is that the image of the kernel that comes in the
tarball I downloaded does not support my SCSI controller.

So my question is: what's the best thing to do?
- start cross-compiling? Note that I was about to build a "Linux From
  Scratch" before deciding to install the Hurd, since I wanted to learn
  a bit more about UNIX-like systems, but still, from what I've read in
  Hurd related docs, cross-compiling is by no means the easy thing you
  can manage to finish in a couple of hours 8-/
- is there a way to add a "module" or something like this to the kernel
  so that it recognizes my card? I doubt this would really work since to
  load the module Hurd would have to read the disk 8-( but well, I'm
  just asking...
- could the Hurd simply use the BIOS to access the hard-drive? Again,
  I'm a little pessimistic, since such a facility would probably have
  been mentionned in page 3 or 4 of the installation manual.
- buy an IDE drive? Err, well, that's a synonymous for "give up".

And finally, to rewrite my question in another way:
- Am I wrong in guessing that my problem comes from the SYM53C8XX driver
  not to be loaded/included?
- Should I cross-compile a new kernel, do I have chances to get a
  working system or are there known bugs in that driver that would make
  things impossible anyway?

Thanks and have a nice day.

Christian.

(*) I tried the Debian Hurd-J1 images and the kernel seems to block
endlessly on the detection of IDE drives...

-- 
Christian Mauduit <ufoot@ufoot.org>     __/\__ ___
                                        \~/ ~/(`_ \   ___
http://www.ufoot.org/                   /_o _\   \ \_/ _ \_
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