Kool Aid Served Daily

Warning, spoilers abound ahead.

I started this one on the plane ride back from Denver. I didn't finish it that night, which says something about my interest. I think the heroine, CC, got pushed down a crevice on an asteroid, and I was upset that she hadn't learned yet that she always got a push in the back when near an edge.

The blurb on the cover reads:

"Classic science fiction that will put Shwartz squarely in the top rank of science-fiction storytellers, alongside the likes of Asimov and Heinlein." -- Amazing Stories

Well, it does remind me of early Heinlein - an idealistic youngster goes off to space and runs into reality.

What I really like about the characterization of CC is that she is idealistic, yet in a very cut throat civilization. Shwartz takes the worst of our recent corporate culture and extends it to an overpopulated future. Everyone gets a PhD, because there is nothing else to do. Actually, getting a PhD is a social stigma, because it means you come from the lower classes. In CC, we see an academic who has to have surgery, dictation lessons, acting lessons, etc, to throw off her background.

She becomes an alpha executive, with a type A personality. She is sent to an asteroid to take care of some business. She leaves behind a fiance, one who from a better family. She is scared of failing.

She finds that frontier society is not as stratified. For example, the highest socially ranking family which comes out with her actually wants the frontier life and mingles with people from opposite ends of the spectrum. I like that Shwartz does manage to pull off a both a stagnant society and lay the groundwork for how it will eventually crumble in the dynamics of the frontier.

But, CC is almost totally clueless. She finds people, actually almost an entire society, who have thrown away everything she hated back on Earth and are actually thriving in their freedom. She keeps on getting told she fits a mold of an aggressive middle executive and she should let up. She falls in love and doesn't realize it.

She has an old enemy who acts stupid and when he slips up, she doesn't clue in that he is the one trying to kill her. In my view, this is how CC fits the classic Heinlein characterization, the Hollywood ideal. Shwartz did go past this with her vision of a believable cultural and economic system. It felt more plausible, more raw/dynamic that Hollywood norm. I did get the feeling that society was on the cusp of being ripped apart. And CC could be an agent of that change if she wanted to start being proactive.

And I did appreciate that, at the end she was not mad when her fiance dumps her, she realized she was just as shallow and upperly mobile has David IV. It gave me hope that she was starting to be honest with herself and could get rid of her nightmares.

I've got an opteron box which will not install the latest Nevada bits (b27 and b31).

I found a nice presentation on a possible bug. But I don't have a clue as to whether or not this is what I am seeing.

Okay, lets fill in the missing steps. How do I get the installer to drop down into kmdb?

I found somewhere, that you can boot with the -k option to do that. Now, how do I get grub to do that? Well, I'm going to base this off of the article GRUB and the Solaris 10 1/06 OS: The New Bootloader for x86 Platforms. Note, I figured out how to get the '-k' option in by myself. But the eeprom settings trick came from there.

You boot the system and let grub come up into the 3 choices available. Instead of booting from the first choice, you edit it. On the next screen, you select 'e' on the first line. It will display to you:

kernel /platform/i86pc/multiboot -B install-media=cdrom

You append '-k' to get:

kernel /platform/i86pc/multiboot -B install-media=cdrom -k

If you put the '-k' before the '-B', it will not work.

You then hit enter, which gets you back to the edit screen. At this point you would hit 'b' to boot with your changes. If instead you escape back to the previous screen and boot from there, well you get the default options.

Now the system boots and you try to tip/minicom to your heart's content. But it doesn't work. What do we need to do now? We need to tell the OS that we need to use the serial port.

Now, you can use a full NULL modem, which I happened to have, or you can use just 3 pins as described by Steve Rikli in the Solaris/x86 FAQ. I quote:

I've found that, while the full NULL modem pinouts work just fine, a simple
3-pin (TD/RD/SG) pinout scheme will also work in Solaris 8 by issuing eeprom
commands thusly:

eeprom output-device=ttya
eeprom input-device=ttya
eeprom ttya-ignore-cd=true

The kicker is the "-ignore-cd" variable, which doesn't seem to be present by
default on a Solaris x86 install, unlike Solaris for SPARC hardware. But setting
it does work and it does persist across reboot/power-cycle. In the absence of
"ttya-ignore-cd=true" one does indeed need a full NULL modem pinout.

By the way, if you know sr at all, this reads just like he talks. :->

I consulted GRUB and the Solaris 10 1/06 OS: The New Bootloader for x86 Platforms, and found out that you can pass any eeprom settings into the kernel as a keyword pair after the '-B'. So we would now change the boot command to be:

kernel /platform/i86pc/multiboot -B install-media=cdrom output-device=ttya input-device=ttya ttya-ignore-cd=true -k

And in the window connected to your serial box:

krtld: Unused kernel arguments: `output-device=ttya input-device=ttya ttya-ignore-cd=true'.
Loading kmdb...
SunOS Release 5.11 Version snv_31 32-bitearch History Buffer, I18n
Copyright 1983-2005 Sun Microsystems, Inc.  All rights reserved.
Use is subject to license terms.
NOTICE: Kernel debugger present: disabling console power management.

What? Okay, it is ignoring the keyword pairs and honoring the '-k'. Grr, it is also ignoring the break from minicom.

And if I reboot to the console with just '-k', it also ignores the break sequence. Grr is too nice.

More to follow. Grr.

Sweet, I just found out why the values were ignored, it should have been:

kernel /platform/i86pc/multiboot -B install-media=cdrom,output-device=ttya,input-device=ttya,ttya-ignore-cd=true -k

And even sweeter, this time I went ahead and selected the second boot option in the main grub menu, i.e., boot to ttya, and added the '-k'. And now Bob's my uncle and I can debug the kernel.

Welcome to kmdb
kmdb: unable to determine terminal type: assuming `vt100'
Loaded modules: [ audiosup uppc ptm ufs unix krtld uhci lofs genunix ip
logindmux usba specfs pcplusmp sctp ]
[0]>

I'll leave any findings for another blog entry.