HCL:Highbank

HP Moonshot

The Calxeda Highbank is a server SoC from Calxeda and builds the core of the HP Moonshot and Boston Viridis servers.

Technical Data

• Quad-Core ARM® Cortex-A9 32-bit processor with 4MB L2 cache provides great power efficiency while delivering all the performance
• Embedded EnergyCore Fabric Switch connects thousands of SoCs through five low-latency 10Gb links
• On-Chip EnergyCore Management Engine runs on separate dedicated processor to provide out-of-band systems management capabilities while simultaneously governing power policies and advanced fabric routing
• Integrated high performance interfaces such as memory controllers with full ECC support and I/O subsystems for local SATA 2.0 ports and PCIe 2.0 support

Installing the openSUSE 12.3 Image (direct disk access)

1. Download the latest openSUSE-12.3-ARM-JeOS-highbank-*.raw.xz image at http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/devel:/ARM:/12.3:/Contrib:/Highbank/images/ .
2. Extract the image onto the disk attached to your Highbank SoC WARNING all previous data on the hard disk will be lost.

    xzcat [image].raw.xz | dd bs=4M of=/dev/sda oflag=sync

3. Connect to the Highbank serial port using ipmitool
4. Power on the Highbank SoC.
5. Walk through the first boot steps on the serial console.
6. Have a lot of fun...

Installing the openSUSE 12.3 Image (PXE deployment)

On your server

1. Download the latest openSUSE-12.3-ARM-JeOS-highbank-*.tar.bz2 image at http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/devel:/ARM:/12.3:/Contrib:/Highbank/images/ .
2. Extract the tar archive you just downloaded
3. Extract the archive "openSUSE*install.tgz" that was inside the tar archive you just extracted
4. Copy initrd*install.gz to /srv/tftpboot/boot/initrd
5. Copy initrd*kernel* to /srv/tftpboot/boot/linux
6. Copy openSUSE*.gz and openSUSE*.md5 to /srv/ftp/image/
7. Write the following section into /srv/tftpboot/pxelinux.cfg/default-arm-highbank

default highbank
	prompt  0
	timeout 5

label highbank
	kernel boot/linux
	initrd boot/initrd
	append loader=uboot pxe=1 kiwiserver=IPv4 console=ttyAMA0,115200 kiwidebug=1 kiwiservertype=ftp

On your highbank machine

1. Power it up through ipmitool
2. Stop u-boot and tell it to run from DHCP

u-boot # dhcp
u-boot # pxe get
u-boot # pxe boot

1. Walk through the installation steps on the serial console.
2. Have a lot of fun...