Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System

Andrew Johnson <[email protected]> · Fri, 10 Jun 2005 13:55:01 -0500

Peregrine McGehee wrote:

Hi Maren,
What sort of boot problems are you seeing when you use
a Linux host?
- we still boot our iocs (vxWorks) from a solaris machine, even if we
don't use solaris for much else anymore (booting from a Linux
host isn't reliable/working)


I can't speak for Maren, but I do know that there was a problem with the
standard vxWorks bootRom code's use of FTP.
There are two TCP sockets involved in an FTP file transfer, a command
socket and a data socket, and the bootRom doesn't actually close its
data socket before sending "QUIT" through the command socket, which is
apparently not legal according to the official FTP spec.
Prior to Solaris 9, the Sun version of ftpd didn't mind which order you
did those operations in, but other ftpd implementations don't like it.
Sun switched to a different ftpd in Solaris 9, and we found we couldn't
boot any of our IOCs after that particular OS upgrade until we reverted
the ftpd back to the Solaris 8 binary (which runs perfectly well under
Solaris 9). They also broke their tftp server, but the Red Hat Linux
one works perfectly well so I just switched to using that instead.
My guess is that JACH are hitting the same problem when trying to boot
from Linux. There is a fix to the bootRom code (see the patch below),
but you have to reprogram all your IOC bootroms to the patched version
to be able to use it. An alternative would be to look for a different,
more lenient implementation of ftpd.
- Andrew
This patch modifies the <tornado>/target/config/all/bootConfig.c file:
Index: bootConfig.c
===================================================================
RCS file: /home/phoebus/TORNADO5/cvsroot/config/all/bootConfig.c,v
retrieving revision 1.2
retrieving revision 1.3
diff -u -r1.2 -r1.3

--- bootConfig.c        12 Mar 2003 22:53:28 -0000      1.2
+++ bootConfig.c        22 Jan 2004 21:18:42 -0000      1.3
@@ -2492,11 +2492,11 @@
        while ((read (fd, command, sizeof (command))) > 0);
+       close (fd);
        if (bootFtp)
            (void) ftpCommand (errFd, "QUIT",0,0,0,0,0,0);
        }
-    close (fd);
     close (errFd);
     return (OK);
@@ -2510,5 +2510,6 @@
        while ((read (fd, command, sizeof (command))) > 0);
+       close (fd);
        if (bootFtp)
            {
@@ -2520,6 +2521,7 @@
        {
        char buf [100];
        int errBytesRecv = fioRead (errFd, buf, sizeof (buf));
+       close (fd);
        if (errBytesRecv > 0)
            {
@@ -2530,7 +2532,6 @@
            }
        }
-    close (fd);
     close (errFd);
 return (ERROR);

--
Podiabombastic: The tendency to shoot oneself in the foot.


Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System

Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System