Bootstrapping sid (was m68k Debian lenny?)
Hello,
Please forgive me for bothering you with what may just be my own inability
Please bother me!
Thanks... I'm glad I've got the right people (or at least person).
m68k is a bit of a mess at the moment and has been suffering severe
manpower shortages for years.
I don't know how much I can help, but I'll do what I can.
When etch was released, the m68k part of it was released as etch-m68k,
with the name change coming at release time with no forewarning. A few
security updates were pushed, but it required modifying source package
versions to pull it off. Since then etch-m68k has been closed to updates.
I've seen mention of etch-m68k stuff... Perhaps I was getting ahead of
myself when I thought that I could bootstrap all the way to lenny.
BTW - what's debian-50-m68k-NETINST-1_emile-1.iso? Was this just a
prelimiary attempt at lenny? I downloaded it because on the mailing list
someone says:
Meanwhile, if it boots, you should be able to install etch-m68k by
putting suite=etch-m68k on the kernel arg line.
I thought at least I could use it to bootstrap etch, but if there's a
better way, please let me know.
The biggest problem has been the lack of thread local storage (TLS) and
Native POSIX Thread Library (NPTL) support for m68k in the kernel and
glibc. This has lead to worsening problems as we had to suffer through
older versions of glibc and toolchain problems.
We have patches in the current binutils. At least some of the linux
patches have recently gone upstream. I think the gcc patches are the last
bit to get cleaned up, but I'm not sure. So we're actually reasonably
close (in theory) to having this functional.
Meanwhile, debian sid for m68k is now hosted on debian-ports.org and is in
serious hurt.
I've been working on bootstrapping a sid chroot from etch-m68k where we
had a solid glibc and toolchain, but it's been slow going.
Trying to wrap my head around all of this...
I'm reading through the mailing lists, particularly an exchange between
yourself and Finn where you talk about bootstrapping sid, and I'm a little
bit lost. I'm not familiar with the Debian development model. How do you
maintain large sets of patches? Do you have a non-Debian CVS location? Or
a publically accessible source location? I'm sure I'd get lost if I were
to try to apply patches based on only what's in the mailing list...
A lot of the references are lost on me - not sure what ftp-master is used
for, what d-i is, what the archive is in the context of rebuilding
everything, but I gather that's a reference to recompiling all the Debian
packages?
Does there exist an available set of binaries of kernel 2.6.31, gcc 4.4.1,
eglibc-2.10, all with the TLS and NPTL patches? If someone's successfully
built these (I get the impression, but not clearly, that many of these
issues were struggled through by you and Finn but the testsuites haven't
been run yet), wouldn't it make sense to help others work on making sid
happen by making a binary installation available as a starting place?
I gather that installing etch-m68k and bootstrapping TLS and NPTL patched
gcc and kernel would be far from trivial...
Probably those links are the latest, at least as far as documentation
goes. d-i doesn't build since the change to eglibc. So all that needs to
be fixed before we can go back to using a modern d-i.
I'm sorry - I'm not even sure what d-i is! I'd just be happy to get a
system where I have a toolchain and source trees and can start trying to
compile stuff.
There wasn't ever a lenny for m68k. I'm certainly happy to help out where
I can. It's also nice to have some new interest. I would suggest we take
the discussion to debian-68k@lists.debian.org where others can help too.
Thanks. So if I'm reading this properly, all of the above updates need to
hapoen at once to get around chicken-and-egg issues, then the updated
system can be used as a basis for sid, and maybe there'll be an m68k
squeeze since lenny basically never happened?
I'm trying to get all of this...
Thanks!
John Klos
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