[Fwd: [hercules-390] Re: Hercules Issues with Fedora 11 S390X]

[Harold Grovesteen]

This was posted on the Hercules list by a fairly frustrated Hercules 
user.  Can anyone shed some light?

Thanks,
Harold Grovesteen

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: 	[hercules-390] Re: Hercules Issues with Fedora 11 S390X
Date: 	Fri, 11 Dec 2009 15:39:24 -0000
From: 	halfmeg <opplr(a)hotmail.com&gt;
Reply-To: 	hercules-390(a)yahoogroups.com
To: 	hercules-390(a)yahoogroups.com



>  Dan Horák wrote: 
>  > halfmeg wrote: 
> <snip> 
>  > So you may be absolutely correct.  If you run Fedora Linux,
>  > install Hercules via their RPM instead of generic compile from
>  > source on any Linux host it may work without difficulty. 
>  Yes, the script expects that you run Fedora/s390x in Hercules
>  packaged in Fedora or in EPEL for RHEL/CentOS, for running on other
>  distros it can serve as an inspiration. 
Sorry, after tinkering with this for several days now, I am not only not inspired, I am
abandoning it altogether.  Not the script but the distribution.

It may be that the s390x version isn't supported as well as the other architectures or
that the need to update x package several times before 'support' for previous
release of the distro is 'officially' discontinued.

There is or was a rpm-4.7.1-1 which according to the Upgrading Fedora web site:

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/YumUpgradeFaq

"All Fedora 12 RPM packages use XZ/LZMA compression, which is only supported by the
rpm-4.7.1-1 update (or later) for Fedora 11. Before upgrading from Fedora 11, run yum
update rpm."

I did that last portion there, 'yum update rpm', and wound up in a catch-22
situation.  Can't update rpm because it can't deal with the XZ compression.

A 'yum list available rpm-4*' results in only rpm-4.7.1-4.fc12 being available.

So much for installing FTP which is the only thing I wanted anyway.

Reading the archive of the Fedora mailing list I spot where someone used SFTP to get a
file into the system.  Yeah, yahoo, huraahh!!

I download MVSDASD's tarball, get it on the Fedora environment, looks good so far. 
Untar it, wow, moving along nicely.  Read the INSTALL file.  Create a symlink for the
kernal source directory to /usr/src/linux as MVSDASD uses that directory to access kernel
headers.  Enter './configure' and get that is can't find css.h in cio
directory.  Hmmm, all the kernel source directories are basically empty.  Ok, kernel
headers for 2.6.29.5-191.fc11.s390x probably weren't compressed with XZ, they should
not be a problem to install via yum.

Enter 'yum list available kernel-headers' and receive back that
2.6.31-0.174.rc7.git2.fc12 is the only one available.  Since the kernel that is running is
2.6.29.5-191.fc11.s390x, the kernel-headers package isn't going to help any.

According to Fedora, F11 is supported until 1 month after F13 is released.  Attempting to
add or update something to it shouldn't be this difficult.  The right stuff may be
available somewhere but I don't know how to modify yum repository info or even find if
a s390x version has been uploaded to a repository.  The RPM page for 4.7.1-1 shows several
for various cpus, but none for s390x.

I know this is something of a departure from a purely Hercules related topic and that my
frustration with what should work or be available has come to the fore in some of the
posts.

Please accept my apology for the diversion.

Phil




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[Dan Horák]

Harold Grovesteen píše v Pá 11. 12. 2009 v 10:26 -0600: 
>  This was posted on the Hercules list by a fairly frustrated Hercules
>
>  user.  Can anyone shed some light? 
I have already seen it on the Hercules list and I will send a reply
after processing the issues mentioned in the mail


Dan

>  Thanks,
>  Harold Grovesteen
>  
>  -------- Original Message --------
>  Subject: 	[hercules-390] Re: Hercules Issues with Fedora 11 S390X
>  Date: 	Fri, 11 Dec 2009 15:39:24 -0000
>  From: 	halfmeg <opplr(a)hotmail.com&gt;
>  Reply-To: 	hercules-390(a)yahoogroups.com
>  To: 	hercules-390(a)yahoogroups.com
>  
>  
>  
>  > Dan Horák wrote:
>  
>  > > halfmeg wrote:
>  
>  ><snip>
>  
>  > > So you may be absolutely correct.  If you run Fedora Linux,
>  > > install Hercules via their RPM instead of generic compile from
>  > > source on any Linux host it may work without difficulty.
>  
>  > Yes, the script expects that you run Fedora/s390x in Hercules
>  > packaged in Fedora or in EPEL for RHEL/CentOS, for running on other
>  > distros it can serve as an inspiration.
>  
>  Sorry, after tinkering with this for several days now, I am not only not inspired, I am
> abandoning it altogether.  Not the script but the distribution.
>  
>  It may be that the s390x version isn't supported as well as the other architectures
> or that the need to update x package several times before 'support' for previous
> release of the distro is 'officially' discontinued.
>  
>  There is or was a rpm-4.7.1-1 which according to the Upgrading Fedora web site:
>  
>  http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/YumUpgradeFaq
>  
>  "All Fedora 12 RPM packages use XZ/LZMA compression, which is only supported by the
> rpm-4.7.1-1 update (or later) for Fedora 11. Before upgrading from Fedora 11, run yum
> update rpm."
>  
>  I did that last portion there, 'yum update rpm', and wound up in a catch-22
> situation.  Can't update rpm because it can't deal with the XZ compression.
>  
>  A 'yum list available rpm-4*' results in only rpm-4.7.1-4.fc12 being available.
>  
>  So much for installing FTP which is the only thing I wanted anyway.
>  
>  Reading the archive of the Fedora mailing list I spot where someone used SFTP to get a
> file into the system.  Yeah, yahoo, huraahh!!
>  
>  I download MVSDASD's tarball, get it on the Fedora environment, looks good so far. 
> Untar it, wow, moving along nicely.  Read the INSTALL file.  Create a symlink for the
> kernal source directory to /usr/src/linux as MVSDASD uses that directory to access kernel
> headers.  Enter './configure' and get that is can't find css.h in cio
> directory.  Hmmm, all the kernel source directories are basically empty.  Ok, kernel
> headers for 2.6.29.5-191.fc11.s390x probably weren't compressed with XZ, they should
> not be a problem to install via yum.
>  
>  Enter 'yum list available kernel-headers' and receive back that
> 2.6.31-0.174.rc7.git2.fc12 is the only one available.  Since the kernel that is running is
> 2.6.29.5-191.fc11.s390x, the kernel-headers package isn't going to help any.
>  
>  According to Fedora, F11 is supported until 1 month after F13 is released.  Attempting to
> add or update something to it shouldn't be this difficult.  The right stuff may be
> available somewhere but I don't know how to modify yum repository info or even find if
> a s390x version has been uploaded to a repository.  The RPM page for 4.7.1-1 shows several
> for various cpus, but none for s390x.
>  
>  I know this is something of a departure from a purely Hercules related topic and that my
> frustration with what should work or be available has come to the fore in some of the
> posts.
>  
>  Please accept my apology for the diversion.
>  
>  Phil
>  
>  
>  
>  
>  ------------------------------------
>  
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>  
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>  
>  
>  
>  
>  _______________________________________________
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>

[Harold Grovesteen]

Dan Horák wrote:

> Harold Grovesteen píše v Pá 11. 12. 2009 v 10:26 -0600: 
>   
>
> >This was posted on the Hercules list by a fairly frustrated Hercules 
> >user.  Can anyone shed some light?
> >    
> >
>
> I have already seen it on the Hercules list and I will send a reply
> after processing the issues mentioned in the mail
>
>
> Dan
>   
>  
Good.  I did not know who might be monitoring things on the Hercules 
list from this list. 

Thanks.

[Dan Horák]

Harold Grovesteen píše v Pá 11. 12. 2009 v 10:26 -0600: 
>  This was posted on the Hercules list by a fairly frustrated Hercules
>
>  user.  Can anyone shed some light?
>  
>  Thanks,
>  Harold Grovesteen 
>  
>  -------- Original Message --------
>  Subject: 	[hercules-390] Re: Hercules Issues with Fedora 11 S390X
>  Date: 	Fri, 11 Dec 2009 15:39:24 -0000
>  From: 	halfmeg <opplr(a)hotmail.com&gt;
>  Reply-To: hercules-390(a)yahoogroups.com 
>  To: 	hercules-390(a)yahoogroups.com
>  
>  
>  
>  > Dan Horák wrote:
>  
>  > > halfmeg wrote:
>  
>  ><snip>
>  
>  > > So you may be absolutely correct.  If you run Fedora Linux,
>  > > install Hercules via their RPM instead of generic compile from
>  > > source on any Linux host it may work without difficulty.
>  
>  > Yes, the script expects that you run Fedora/s390x in Hercules
>  > packaged in Fedora or in EPEL for RHEL/CentOS, for running on other
>  > distros it can serve as an inspiration.
>  
>  Sorry, after tinkering with this for several days now, I am not only not inspired, I am
> abandoning it altogether.  Not the script but the distribution.
>  
>  It may be that the s390x version isn't supported as well as the other architectures
> or that the need to update x package several times before 'support' for previous
> release of the distro is 'officially' discontinued. 
I will start with the history a bit and also show our plans for the
future. I hope it will help you understand that the current situation is
only transient before having normal installation media and tested
upgrade paths.

Fedora/s390x was started as a public Fedora secondary architecture [1]
this year after effectively being dead for years. There were some
internal rebuilds of Fedora subsets, but they were just bunch of
packages not a full distribution. The last release of a Red Hat-based
distribution for s390/s390x is RHEL-5 almost three years ago with
CentOS-4 being the last community version. Since these days Linux kernel
and all related software packages made many steps forward and the whole
environment is very different than in the past, not to mention that
s390/s390x architecture itself is quite different from the rest.

The current situation is that we are able to build the large majority of
Fedora packages from the same sources as are used for i386, x86_64 or
other architectures and a lot work was done in the anaconda installer,
so it should be possible to start preparing installation medias in the
very near future. To overcome the non-existence of installation medias
we released the DASD image with Fedora 11 pre-installed, to be correct a
RHEL-5 system was used to install the Fedora 11 packages into a chrooted
environment and they were polished a bit to a bootable environment.

>  There is or was a rpm-4.7.1-1 which according to the Upgrading Fedora
> web site:
>  
>  http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/YumUpgradeFaq
>  
>  "All Fedora 12 RPM packages use XZ/LZMA compression, which is only supported by the
> rpm-4.7.1-1 update (or later) for Fedora 11. Before upgrading from Fedora 11, run yum
> update rpm."
>  
>  I did that last portion there, 'yum update rpm', and wound up in a catch-22
> situation.  Can't update rpm because it can't deal with the XZ compression.
>  
>  A 'yum list available rpm-4*' results in only rpm-4.7.1-4.fc12 being available.
>  
>  So much for installing FTP which is the only thing I wanted anyway. 
As described above, we are still in a development phase where answers
from primary Fedora doesn't directly apply. While the described way is
right in general, it must done manually by downloading the right
packages from the buildsystem and updating them with "rpm" before
continuing the upgrade with yum. And there are still few problems during
the upgrade, but all can be resolved easily. 

>  Reading the archive of the Fedora mailing list I spot where someone
> used SFTP to get a file into the system.  Yeah, yahoo, huraahh!!
>  
>  I download MVSDASD's tarball, get it on the Fedora environment, looks good so far. 
> Untar it, wow, moving along nicely.  Read the INSTALL file.  Create a symlink for the
> kernal source directory to /usr/src/linux as MVSDASD uses that directory to access kernel
> headers.  Enter './configure' and get that is can't find css.h in cio
> directory.  Hmmm, all the kernel source directories are basically empty.  Ok, kernel
> headers for 2.6.29.5-191.fc11.s390x probably weren't compressed with XZ, they should
> not be a problem to install via yum.
>  
>  Enter 'yum list available kernel-headers' and receive back that
> 2.6.31-0.174.rc7.git2.fc12 is the only one available.  Since the kernel that is running is
> 2.6.29.5-191.fc11.s390x, the kernel-headers package isn't going to help any. 
The kernel packages packages are designed the way, that only files
in /lib/modules/$(uname -r)/build should be required by modules living
outside the official kernel, that's how the kernel developers designed
it, not a distributions' invention. I haven't tried to build the MVSDASD
module yet, but I will test it. 

>  According to Fedora, F11 is supported until 1 month after F13 is
> released.  Attempting to add or update something to it shouldn't be this difficult. 
> The right stuff may be available somewhere but I don't know how to modify yum
> repository info or even find if a s390x version has been uploaded to a repository.  The
> RPM page for 4.7.1-1 shows several for various cpus, but none for s390x. 
The build system is the place that contains all packages ever built for
Fedora/s390x. In the final state the upgrades will work as in primary
Fedora, either using installation media or online using the preupgrade
tool. And yes, the lifetime of 13 months is short for some applications
and that's why RHEL and CentOS exist. 

>  I know this is something of a departure from a purely Hercules
> related topic and that my frustration with what should work or be available has come to
> the fore in some of the posts. 
It is really unfortunate that you didn't try to contact us for some help
using this (fedora-s390x) mailing list, the #fedora-s390x IRC channel
[2] or privately, because I think we could resolve all the described
issue.


With regards,
Dan


[1] http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Architectures
[2] http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Architectures/s390x

[Harold Grovesteen]

Dan Horák wrote:

> Harold Grovesteen píše v Pá 11. 12. 2009 v 10:26 -0600: 
>   
>
> >This was posted on the Hercules list by a fairly frustrated Hercules 
> >user.  Can anyone shed some light?
> >
> >Thanks,
> >Harold Grovesteen 
> >
> >-------- Original Message --------
> >Subject: 	[hercules-390] Re: Hercules Issues with Fedora 11 S390X
> >Date: 	Fri, 11 Dec 2009 15:39:24 -0000
> >From: 	halfmeg <opplr(a)hotmail.com&gt;
> >Reply-To: hercules-390(a)yahoogroups.com 
> >To: 	hercules-390(a)yahoogroups.com
> >
> >    
> > 
I wasn't having the issue, but halfmeg was.  It will let him know that 
you provided a response here.

One question, when you finally have distribution media will you continue 
to build the pre-installed disk image?  That was useful to me.  Although 
I have not had much opportunity to work with it since, it got me 
started.  I was frustrated some time back when Debian ceased to build a 
disk image for Hercules.  Novell never did, nor did Centos, nor did 
RHEL.  I hope you will continue to provide at least a basic disk image 
for the Hercules community as a starter system.  That same system could 
be used on VM with the AWSUTIL packages of Hercules.

[Dan Horák]

Harold Grovesteen píše v Út 15. 12. 2009 v 05:54 -0600: 
>  
>  Dan Horák wrote:
>  
>  >Harold Grovesteen píše v Pá 11. 12. 2009 v 10:26 -0600: 
>  >  
>  >
>  >>This was posted on the Hercules list by a fairly frustrated Hercules 
>  >>user.  Can anyone shed some light?
>  >>
>  >>Thanks,
>  >>Harold Grovesteen 
>  >>
>  >>-------- Original Message --------
>  >>Subject: 	[hercules-390] Re: Hercules Issues with Fedora 11 S390X
>  >>Date: 	Fri, 11 Dec 2009 15:39:24 -0000
>  >>From: 	halfmeg <opplr(a)hotmail.com&gt;
>  >>Reply-To: hercules-390(a)yahoogroups.com 
>  >>To: 	hercules-390(a)yahoogroups.com
>  >>
>  >>    
>  >>
>  I wasn't having the issue, but halfmeg was.  It will let him know that 
>  you provided a response here. 
halfmeg was on CC, so he should receive the reply directly

>  One question, when you finally have distribution media will you
> continue 
>  to build the pre-installed disk image?  That was useful to me.  Although 
>  I have not had much opportunity to work with it since, it got me 
>  started.  I was frustrated some time back when Debian ceased to build a 
>  disk image for Hercules.  Novell never did, nor did Centos, nor did 
>  RHEL.  I hope you will continue to provide at least a basic disk image 
>  for the Hercules community as a starter system.  That same system could 
>  be used on VM with the AWSUTIL packages of Hercules. 
Yes, we will provide the pre-installed images because it's the simplest
way for people to step in. When I did the quite minimal installation of
RHEL 5.x in Hercules last time it took 5+ hours to complete IIRC. Plus
the fact that devices and network must be set correctly for a successful
installation it will really be better to distribute also the
pre-installed image.


Dan

[Harold Grovesteen]

Dan Horák wrote:

> Harold Grovesteen píše v Út 15. 12. 2009 v 05:54 -0600: 
>   
>
> >Dan Horák wrote:
> >
> >    
> >
> >>Harold Grovesteen píše v Pá 11. 12. 2009 v 10:26 -0600: 
> >> 
> >>
> >>      
> >>
> >>>This was posted on the Hercules list by a fairly frustrated Hercules 
> >>>user.  Can anyone shed some light?
> >>>
> >>>Thanks,
> >>>Harold Grovesteen 
> >>>
> >>>-------- Original Message --------
> >>>Subject: 	[hercules-390] Re: Hercules Issues with Fedora 11 S390X
> >>>Date: 	Fri, 11 Dec 2009 15:39:24 -0000
> >>>From: 	halfmeg <opplr(a)hotmail.com&gt;
> >>>Reply-To: hercules-390(a)yahoogroups.com 
> >>>To: 	hercules-390(a)yahoogroups.com
> >>>
> >>>   
> >>>
> >>>        
> >>>
> >I wasn't having the issue, but halfmeg was.  It will let him know that 
> >you provided a response here.
> >    
> >
>
> halfmeg was on CC, so he should receive the reply directly
>
>   
>
> >One question, when you finally have distribution media will you continue 
> >to build the pre-installed disk image?  That was useful to me.  Although 
> >I have not had much opportunity to work with it since, it got me 
> >started.  I was frustrated some time back when Debian ceased to build a 
> >disk image for Hercules.  Novell never did, nor did Centos, nor did 
> >RHEL.  I hope you will continue to provide at least a basic disk image 
> >for the Hercules community as a starter system.  That same system could 
> >be used on VM with the AWSUTIL packages of Hercules.
> >    
> >
>
> Yes, we will provide the pre-installed images because it's the simplest
> way for people to step in. When I did the quite minimal installation of
> RHEL 5.x in Hercules last time it took 5+ hours to complete IIRC. Plus
> the fact that devices and network must be set correctly for a successful
> installation it will really be better to distribute also the
> pre-installed image.
>
>   
>
> Dan
>
>   
>  
Precisely.  This is the first Linux distro to acknowledge these hurdles 
and address them with Hercules.  BTW, I don't believe those challenges 
are any different with the real big iron installs.

Harold

[Phil Roberts]

>  Dan Horák wrote: 
> <snip> 
>  It is really unfortunate that you didn't try to contact us for
> some help
>  using this (fedora-s390x) mailing list, the #fedora-s390x IRC channel
>  [2] or privately, because I think we could resolve all the described
>  issue. 

>  With regards,
>  Dan 
My lack of knowledge is broad and deep.  My frustration level high.  Will
touch base with you and Harold off list.

Phil