Anyone successfully kickstarting/building RHEL 7 ppc64 systems w/ Satellite 6

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Curious to heaer peoples experience thus far w/ building RHEL7 ppc64 systems on Satellite 6. There's not a lot of documentation from the Satellite side on building from bare-metal Linux on Power with Satellite6. I've managed to cobble together the tftp/network boot portions, but am at a loss as far as how to provide the kickstart to the lpar from Satellite 6.

Red Hat folks are there plans to release a discovery image for non x86_64 architectures? (maybe at least ppc64)

Thanks

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Hello,

unfortunately there is no provisioning support for non-x86 architectures at the moment (Satellite 6.2). For the same reason, we only ship x86_64 discovery image (there are no plans to do i386 image).

I wasn't able to find provisioning support scope document right now, but my assumption is we only support x86 architectures for provisioning and configuration management and all RHEL architectures for client registration content (RPMs, errata). But the upstream project (Foreman) supports multiple Linux distributions, Solaris, some BSDs or network switches for provisioning and since we ship the product unmodified (no features are disabled), I assume this will work and Red Hat will provide "best-effort" support to these.

There are two ways how to get a new architecture into Satellite 6. The first and obvious is to file RFE via official support channels, but I expect that when expanding architectures ARM64 will get higher priority than PPC/PPC64. The other one is to help the community to achieve the support and there are several levels of help from design documents, discussions on the list, testing and doing POCs, actual code writing, documentation to contributing hardware resources for development and testing.

As I read RHEL 7 Installation Guide for System z, it looks like it is possible to boot modern z systems via PXE and Grub2 and technically it should be only matter of deploying ELF firmware onto TFTP service, configuring dhcpd.conf for the filename option and creating architecture, operating system and provisioning templates (Grub2 type) in Satellite 6. Since Grub2 is going to be added in Satellite 6.3 with UEFI support feature, you'll need to wait for the next release. In the meantime, you can test Foreman 1.13+ upstream (Katello 3.2+) which already have Grub2 type of template. For older System z series, we'd need to implement new bootloader in Foreman (yaboot) and that's more amount of engineering work. For more info visit project homepage and also RFC document about recently added UEFI/Grub2 support.

Edit: Formatted links.

A note about ARM64 vs PPC priorities - this is solely my own anticipation (as a software engineer) and does not represent official Red Hat attitude on this subject. To clarify, I have plans to work on ARM64 support in the upstream as my hobby (evenings) project later this year (waiting until some appropriate ARM hardware shows up), therefore I think this gets implemented sooner. But this is not the only time a customer raised this, so we might be working on PPC sooner than I think.

Thanks for the followup Lukas. As always you're a wealth of information. I spent most of the day yesterday working on figuring out the nuts and bolts of implementing provisioning for PPC64 on Satellite 6 (via a remote capsule no less) and I think I have it. This doesn't solve the Discovery issue, but I should be able to provision LPARs as Linux systems with minimal extra effort.

Contributing would have to be an on my own time thing too (politics), but I'll start looking into providing what I've done upstream as well. I'm sure ARM is going to get the most attention with all the advances there of late. But I also know there are PPC folks creeping around here waiting for the answers to these same questions...

Thank you for info. Any kind of information how have you put things together is a big help for the community (blog post, e-mail to the list) so others can take it from there and push it through the review process or necessary code changes.

Let me know when you finish and I can perhaps try to do PPC64 discovery scratch build. It should be only matter of rebuilding it as our bits are in Ruby, the only thing that worries me is newt Ruby binding library - it's a native code which might fail on PPC64 (and I am sure it will fail on PPC64LE).

Lukas I've got a case open for this now, but I've got it basically working: On the Capsule 1) DHCP information needs to be updated with correct boot file when a new host is provisioned and allow bootp should be set

  allow bootp;
  filename "boot/grub2/powerpc-ieee1275/core.elf";

2) grub.cfg- needs to be created in proper tftpboot location ( boot/grub/powerpc-ieee1275/

3) the Power tftp boot tree needs to be created on the capsule as part of the build (/var/lib/tftpboot/boot

drwxr-xr-x. 6 foreman-proxy root     4096 Aug 24 10:41 .
drwxr-xr-x. 3 foreman-proxy root     4096 Sep 24 08:10 ..
drwxr-xr-x. 2 foreman-proxy root       24 Aug 24 10:41 fonts
drwxr-xr-x. 2 foreman-proxy root     8192 Sep 13 10:21 i386-pc
-rw-r--r--. 1 foreman-proxy unix 33761820 Dec  8  2015 initrd.img
-rw-r--r--. 1 foreman-proxy root 33761820 Jul  9  2015 initrd.img.old
drwxr-xr-x. 2 foreman-proxy root     4096 Aug 24 10:41 locale
drwxr-xr-x. 2 foreman-proxy root     8192 Sep 26 10:58 powerpc-ieee1275
-rw-r--r--. 1 foreman-proxy unix 20450784 Dec  8  2015 vmlinuz
-rw-r--r--. 1 foreman-proxy root 20450784 Jul  9  2015 vmlinuz.old

This all comes right out of the documentation

grub2-mknetdir –net-directory=/var/lib/tftpboot

Good reference here Booting Linux on Power

I'll write up a step by step blog post later today and get you the link.

I've had to do some workarounds (static hosts in dhcp, manually creating the tree , etc)

Looks good, Will. Thanks for that.

Thanks for sharing, Foreman 1.13.1 (Katello 3.2.1) will support Grub2 and the POWER Grub2 loader filename, we decided to use a different name on the TFTP tho. It is described how to create a single grub2 binary here:

http://projects.theforeman.org/issues/16652

Let me know if this works for you.

Hello guys, first thanks to all for all this very useful information. I'm able to netboot/kickstart LPARS from P8, and it works like a charm. At least on P8, but not on P9. Any idea if the bootp procedure is different on P9 ?

still waiting to get our P9's racked.. maybe next week. I can definitely give it a shot once they are up. We switched to PowerVC for all IBM P deployments, so we're using images for RHEL on Power now, instead of kickstarting, but I do need to KS when I build out a new gold image.

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