Re: NFSroot & Power4 (was Re: Debian non-x86 kernel arches)
On Sun, May 23, 2004 at 04:36:16PM -0500, Troy Benjegerdes wrote:
> On Sun, May 23, 2004 at 06:53:04PM +0200, Jens Schmalzing wrote:
> > Hi,
> >
> > Troy Benjegerdes writes:
> >
> > > > Have you tried running the 2.6.6 kernel-image packages on them?
> > >
> > > No, all of them have > 4GB of memory, and a 32 bit kernel is quite
> > > useless. Thus my strong interest in ppc64 gcc/glibc/etc ;)
> >
> > Fair enough :)
> >
> > Can you still give it at least a try? From 2.4 to 2.6, the
> > Debian/PowerPC kernel-image packages changed quite radically, and we
> > haven't had any reports on non-Apple machines so far. Not counting
> > Sven's Pegasos, of course.
> >
> > Regards, Jens.
>
> Our environment at the lab is a netboot+nfsroot setup... Is there a
> reasonable way to make a debian kernel image nfsroot? You probably don't
> want to include every network driver needed in-kernel, and include
> nfsroot.
>
> What is the state of initramfs? Is it at all useable?
>
> The additional problem is I believe the pSeries firmware we have will
> only netboot a zImage.. it can't use yaboot, etc, which means the zImage
> would have to have a ramdisk image packed up with it. (FYI, pSeries is the
> new name for rs6000, iSeries is the name for the old AS400)
Yeah, we have worked on that quite intensively.
> Also, would it make more sense to have '-g5, -g5-smp, -pSeries-smp,
> -iSeries-smp' kernels instead of power3 and power4 non-smp variants? Are
> there any single-cpu power3/power4 machines?
The iserie/pserie distinction makes only a difference once we have a
ppc64 toolchain, as the the iserie is only supported in ppc64 kernel.
Furthermore, the pserie can be optimized for power4/g5, at which point
it will no more work for power3, so there may be still need of doing a
per cpu kernel, not sure though.
> My other hesitation to use 2.6 ppc32 power3/power4 kernels is that I'm
> not aware of anyone at IBM actually maintaining the kernel source for a
> 32 bit kernel anymore.. all the work has gone to 64 bit kernels.
Yeah, but until we have a ppc64 toolchain, that is all we have got, and
furthermore, the actual testing will go into the infrastructure around
the kernel, the mkvmlinuz needed to create the zImage.chrp-rs6k from the
vmlinux and the creation of the initrd, which altough it works well on
pmac, fails on my pegasos (and probably also on your pseries). Also the
config needs testing. This part of the testing will mostly be the same
for the ppc32 and ppc64 kernels, and it is good we need feedback on
those.
> Personally, I'd be happy with completely depracating the -power3 and
> -power4 kernels until we have a 64 bit biarch compiler package.
Nope, first we need to get the biarch toolchain, and then we can
deprecate the power3 and power4 kernels. This is how things work in
debian.
Friendly,
Svne Luther
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