Bug 343901 - Cannot do network install on the PS3
Summary: Cannot do network install on the PS3
Keywords:
Status: CLOSED RAWHIDE
Alias: None
Product: Fedora
Classification: Fedora
Component: kernel
Version: rawhide
Hardware: other
OS: Linux
low
medium
Target Milestone: ---
Assignee: Kernel Maintainer List
QA Contact: Fedora Extras Quality Assurance
URL:
Whiteboard:
: 345891 (view as bug list)
Depends On:
Blocks: F8Target
TreeView+ depends on / blocked
 
Reported: 2007-10-20 16:02 UTC by Julio Merino
Modified: 2013-01-10 04:28 UTC (History)
2 users (show)

Fixed In Version:
Clone Of:
Environment:
Last Closed: 2007-10-30 18:20:10 UTC
Type: ---
Embargoed:


Attachments (Terms of Use)

Description Julio Merino 2007-10-20 16:02:30 UTC
I am trying to install a recent version of Fedora on a PS3, but I'm finding
problems.  At first I went with Fedora 8 Test 3, but the installer could not
recognize the internal hard disk.  I then found bug 325111, which described this
hard-disk problem and proposed a fix.  Seeing that the fix was applied to
rawhide, I just went and downloaded a rawhide installation image from the FTP. 
It's date is Oct 16.

Unfortunately, I cannot use this installation image to install Fedora on the
machine.  When I reach the Installation Method menu, I select FTP.  After that,
a window appears that says:

Title: No driver found
Message: Unable to find any devices of the type needed for this installation
type.  Would you like to manually select your driver or use a driver disk?
Buttons: Select driver, Use a driver disk, Back

I chose "Select driver", and from the menu (which by the way is unusable because
it overflows the screen size) I chose the ps3_gelic one.  I can see that the
driver correctly discovers the card in the fourth virtual terminal (it prints
the MAC address), but Anaconda refuses to recognize it as a network card.

I bet that the problem may be very similar to the one described in 325111.  If
it turns out to be similar, it'd be worth to scan all the sources to make sure
all references to devices are correct.

Comment 1 David Woodhouse 2007-10-22 14:06:50 UTC
This would probably be a kudzu bug.

Comment 2 David Woodhouse 2007-10-23 08:58:53 UTC
*** Bug 345891 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 3 David Woodhouse 2007-10-23 09:00:01 UTC
Or maybe not kudzu...

[root@ps3 ~]# uname -a
Linux ps3.infradead.org 2.6.23-6.fc8 #1 SMP Thu Oct 11 13:36:53 EDT 2007 ppc64
ppc64 ppc64 GNU/Linux
[root@ps3 ~]# rpm -q kudzu
kudzu-1.2.79-1
[root@ps3 ~]# cat testit.py
#!/usr/bin/python

import kudzu

devices = kudzu.probe (kudzu.CLASS_NETWORK,
                       kudzu.BUS_UNSPEC, 0);

for device in devices:
#    (dev, driver, desc) = device
    print device
[root@ps3 ~]# ./testit.py 
Desc:           PlayStation 3 Gigabit Ethernet
Driver:         ps3_gelic
Device:         eth0



Comment 4 David Woodhouse 2007-10-23 09:37:06 UTC
Extracting the installer's ramdisk.image.gz, running
sed -i s/gelic_net/ps3_gelic/g bin/loader
and recreating the ramdisk, seems sufficient to fix this. Which means it looks
like it might already be fixed in kudzu 1.2.79, and the next build of anaconda
will be fine. 

Comment 5 Jeremy Katz 2007-10-23 14:14:30 UTC
Today's rawhide should be better then as I rebuilt anaconda last night against
kudzu-1.2.79

Comment 6 Jesse Keating 2007-10-23 14:39:47 UTC
Nope, still no good.  The only networking device detected by anaconda is the USB
ethernet I have plugged in so that I can get to stage2.

Comment 7 Kazunori Asayama 2007-10-26 11:58:53 UTC
(In reply to comment #5)
> Today's rawhide should be better then as I rebuilt anaconda last night against
> kudzu-1.2.79

The loader in the latest boot.iso still says:

CRITICAL: no network device in chooseNetworkInterface

This message is displayed when the kudzu's probeDevices function returns no
network device. However, according to the messages from the loader, it looks
like the ps3_gelic driver is successfully loaded:

INFO    : loaded ps3_gelic from /modules/modules.cgz
...
INFO    : inserted /tmp/ps3_gelic.ko


Comment 8 David Woodhouse 2007-10-26 12:16:04 UTC
Bizarre. This was working for me. Could it be that it only fails on devices with
wireless network?

Comment 9 Kazunori Asayama 2007-10-26 13:34:25 UTC
Ah, I had not tried a device without wireless networking. I just now tried it,
and it looks good. This problem seems specific to models with wireless networking.


Comment 10 Jesse Keating 2007-10-26 14:32:36 UTC
Yes, my PS3 has wireless.

Comment 11 David Woodhouse 2007-10-26 15:33:57 UTC
Does anaconda disregard eth0 because it has wireless extensions and thus somehow
doesn't "match" what it expects to find?

The way the wireless is done on PS3 is that it's magically bridged to the wired
device, I believe. 

Comment 12 Julio Merino 2007-10-26 15:49:45 UTC
Yes, something weird happens.  Both cards share the same MAC, for example.

Comment 13 Kazunori Asayama 2007-10-29 06:35:03 UTC
I found the reason why the ether was ignored by anaconda. In the
chooseNetworkInterface function in anaconda/loader2/net.c, there is a check as
following:

        /* require passing a flag for wireless while our wireless support 
         * sucks */
        if (is_wireless_interface(devs[i]->device) && !FL_ALLOW_WIRELESS(flags))
            continue;

On a PS3 model with wireless networking, the ether network device is also
reported as a wireless device because they share the same device name, so the
ether device is excluded from the result by this check.


Comment 14 Jeremy Katz 2007-10-29 15:18:21 UTC
Gah.  The ps3 networking device is incredibly broken.  And this support isn't
upstream either.

Although anaconda could say "okay, the wireless device is okay to use" it's
still going to look like a wireless device and so we're still going to require
an essid to connect to even when being used in wired mode.  This will also have
the same behavior with NetworkManager.

Realistically, we need to pull the patch because there's no way we can do the
right thing with its current behavior.

Comment 15 Kazunori Asayama 2007-10-30 03:38:19 UTC
The maintainer of ps3_gelic said that the upcoming wireless networking support
in upstream would use a separate device name from the ether device's, and
consequently this problem will be solved in the near future.

So, at this point, it sounds reasonable to remove wireless networking support on
PS3 from the kernel.


Comment 16 David Woodhouse 2007-10-30 03:51:10 UTC
Wireless disabled in kernel-2.6.23.1-40.fc8. We can turn it back on again in an
update, when there's a suitable driver. Please confirm that the install is
fixed, and we can close this bug.

Comment 17 Jesse Keating 2007-10-30 18:20:10 UTC
Verified that network (ethernet) installs work on my ps3 now which has a
wireless device in it as well.  Good enough for F8.


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