Bug#365203: rootskel: Please support the ppc64 architecture
Hello Frans,
thank you for your reply to my call for help! I know that you
have a lot of serious work to do for the release architectures.
So thanks again for taking the time to look at the comparatively
unimportant ppc64 case.
On 06-May-01 03:52, Frans Pop wrote:
> How many other patches will be needed to get the level of ppc64 support
> you are aiming for?
> If the current set is all, I'm willing to go for it. If we're going to get
> a lot more patches, I really doubt it's worth it.
An additional patch to the 'debian-installer' package will be necessary.
That patch does 's/powerpc/powerpc ppc64/' in the Build-Depends and
adds the appropriate ppc64 specific files to the build/config
and build/pkg-lists directories.
The 'debian-installer' patch which I am currently using to build and
test d-i on ppc64 is 96 lines long. It basically reuses the config
files from the existing powerpc/powerpc64 case by directly including them.
My intention was to send this patch as a wishlist request to
the BTS but I will wait for a 'green light' from you before I send
another ppc64 related patch to a d-i package.
> Also, have all preconditions already been met (like ppc64 support in
> debootstrap, bootloaders, initrd generators and other packages used by
> d-i).
Debootstrap, bootloaders and initrd generatures are already working on
ppc64.
The ppc64 architecture generally uses the same things as the
existing powerpc/powerpc64 case. The only difference is that the
user space is 64-bit instead of 32-bit. So the necessary infrastructure
was already there. Basically only a few instances of 'ppc64' had to be
inserted at the appropriate places to make things work for ppc64. For
most packages in the archive this has already been done sucessfully
in the current 'unstable' and 'testing' versions.
> Please provide the full picture. We may re-evaluate after that.
I have built a version of d-i for ppc64 which includes a mini.iso.
That mini.iso boots fine on my ppc64 machine and the installation
process starts and works up to a point.
I had to set up the network manually to get around a problem with the
automatic DHCP setup and there is also a problem with the partition
detection.
At least the partition detection problem will probably lead to
another ppc64 related patch. Consequently, I can not promise that
there will be no more patches necessary to make d-i work on ppc64.
I fully understand if you decide that it takes too much time away from
more important tasks to bother with ppc64 and I can live with
a situation where I have to keep a set of separate d-i patches for
the ppc64 archive. But it would of course be easier to eventually get
things integrated into the official d-i sources. I still hope that
this will be possible at some point.
Regards
Andreas Jochens
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