PPC LPAR Recovery ISO fails to boot | Out of Memory

On IBM Power systems 9 & 10 you may see an error with “out of memory” when booting a PPC or PPCLE ISO.

This is because a new value is set causing more memory to be assigned than there is space available in initrrd.

Workaround

After you boot an LPAR, you can change the real-base value to the default value of 0xc00000 to resolve this issue. The real-base value can be changed to the default value from the Open Firmware (OF) command prompt by using one of the following methods:

  • OF prompt commands by pressing 8 during the boot operation.
    • To print the real-base value, enter the following command:
printenv real-base
  • To set the default value for real-base, enter the following command:
setenv real-base c00000
  • Restricted OF prompt commands by pressing 9 during the boot operation.
    • To display the real-base value, enter the following command:
DISPLAY_NVRAM_VARS real-base
  • To set the default value for real-base, enter the following command:
SET_NVRAM_REALBASE c00000

Then reboot into the ISO and run through the recovery.