The IA64 Experience

The machine in the Supercomputing Bay is old. Older than most people in the lab. Yet it has impressive specs. Four Itanium processors. 8GB RAM. Two 80GB SCSI HDDs. And Red Hat 7.2.

This Itanium "server" was condemned to that slow death that is inevitable when you install a distribution that doesn't support in-place upgrades. It grows so old, software-wise, that nobody wants to use the perfectly good hardware anymore. So, last week, when a friend wanted the latest kernel on this machine, I decided to install Debian Etch onto it.

The first thing, of course, is that Itanium machines don't have a BIOS bootloader. Like the Intel Macs, they have EFI. Think of it as a inbuilt Grub, but with lots of additional features. For example, it can boot over the network using PXE directly. There is a command prompt with commands faintly reminscient of DOS commands. It even features a full screen text editor that you can use to edit files on a FAT partition. And yes, it takes a glorious 100MB partition for itself. No more 512-byte boot sectors for EFI.

Unfortunately, this EFI bootloader couldn't boot from the ATAPI slave CD-ROM, without a master.

So it was upto network installation to save the day. Debian installed onto the IA64 over the Internet nicely (yay for Mbps internet speeds!), and booted up just fine. Like all Linux distributions, it uses elilo to boot on the IA64 -- Grub is not supported. However, elilo seems much nicer than its cousin which has been supplanted by Grub on
the x86.

Here are somethings I learnt:

• The Pause key is useful for paging through output at the EFI console.
  
• If the "EFI Shell [Built-in]" option does not drop you at a shell, but starts up elilo instead, the file startup.nsh might exist. You can press CTRL+C quickly after selecting EFI Shell to get to a prompt. This will cancel elilo and allow you to delete/edit the startup.nsh file.