d-i powerpc status report.

[Sven Luther <sven.luther@wanadoo.fr>]

Hello,

I have grabed the latest d-i builds from Thorsten, and i used the
netboot image to build an builtin initrd kernel for chrp. I have not yet
tried the cdrom image, but latest experiences provded that it may well
be too big, altough the cdrom image might have decreased in size lately.

So, i managed to boot it with the devfs=mount option, and it worked just
fine. I think the subarch detection is still not working right, or maybe
kbd-choser doesn't know about it, since i was presented with choice of
only USB mac keyboards, while i use a standrard ps2 keyboard. 

the come back button did not work, and i miss a choice for searching in
the arch-indep list of keyboards there.

I promptly rebooted the box at this state, since i cannot afford to
loose my harddisk another time right now. I will test this again once i
have finished with the kernel RTC clock work i am doing right now, and
which is needed for a true unified kernel between pmac, chrp, chrp-rs6k
and prep.

What about the beta2 readiness issue ? We have not yet talked about
that. I believe that it should be almost ok, but i would like a comment
from the pmac peoples.

A few notes though :

  - oldpmac will not be supported. This is post beta2 issue, but
    kernel-wise everything should be ready for it. We need a
    powerpc-small image, and the needed stuff to build the miboot floppy
    images, as well as a quik-installer udeb probably.
  - chrp, crhp-rs6k and prep should be ok, once the builtin initrd is
    built, and if subarch detection works ok. I am ok with letting the
    builtin initrd stuff wait for post-beta2, since it is possible to
    build them by hand, but the detection stuff should be fixed before
    beta2.
  - power3 and power4 : no kernels are built. I will probably soon
    enable builds of 32bit kernels for those processors, and upload them
    to experimental. 64bit kernels would need support from gcc to build,
    and we are not yet there.
  - G5 pmacs : my kernel doesn't support them yet. maybe a new kernel,
    based on benh's 2.6 tree would be a solution there. Definitively
    post beta2 material.

Also, on the kernel issue, we currently use 2.4.22, which has been
patched for the security issues. 2.4.20 and 2.4.21 have been removed
from experimental.

But, the installed kernels should really be based on 2.4.23 or above,
since these include recent drm modules, and the dri/xfree86 packagers
have decided to not propose standalone drm modules anymore. I would
ideally skip 2.4.23 and package 2.4.24, but herbert has not yet packaged
these.

Anything else i have missed ?

Friendly,

Sven Luther