Re: PPC subarches
On Mon, Aug 02, 2004 at 02:45:34PM +0200, Jens Schmalzing wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Ross Vumbaca writes:
>
> > >>Is the AmigaONE a subarch, or it's own flavor?
>
> > > Please remind me, what processor does the thing have and how do
> > > you boot it?
>
> Thanks for the info. To answer the original question: In the current
> packaging scheme of the Debian kernels, flavours roughly correspond to
> processor families and subarchs to booting methods. The AmigaONE
> falls in four different flavour/subarch combinations.
Err, ... i think they need a new uboot flavour.
> The processors are covered by the powerpc and power4 flavours, so
> that's no problem.
I don't think the AmigaOne folk need to worry about power4, they only have a
7450 or something such as G4 processor, there is no way they can currently use
a PPC970 (aka G5) on their Mai northbridge.
> If I understand your description correctly, both the direct boot from
> uboot and the a1boot boot loader require uboot kernel images. Support
> for creating those could easily be added to the mkvmlinuz package,
Yep, indeed. In the same way that the prep stuff was added, since uboot is
another of those simple bootloader flavours.
> which uses code from the kernel Makefiles to create bootable
> compressed kernel images for other subarchs from the raw uncompressed
> ELF file. However, it only works out of the box for 2.6 kernels right
> now, so if you want to use that you should really forward port your
> patches. And submit them upstream as well.
Or let us (me, benh and hch) review them before they go upstream. Maybe we
need another branch on subversion, for kernels who can be uploaded to
experimentatl or something such.
> If you insist on using 2.4, this requires the creation of a separate
> kernel-image-<version>-<flavour>-uboot package containing the uboot
> kernel image for that kernel version and flavour. Given that 2.4
> support is slowly phasing out, this may not be worth the effort.
No, indeed.
> As far as the a1boot boot loader is concerned, you could either
> package it separately and then find a sponsor to upload it to Debian,
> or add it to the existing amiga-fdisk package through a patch.
I have serious doubts the a1bootloader will be considered open source by
debian-legal, but i may be wrong.
Friendly,
Sven Luther
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