Hello Debian-m68k fans. I'm new here and have run in to a strange problem installing Debian on my Mac SE/30. Apologies for the long post but I've got a lot to report!
Executive summary: I can boot a kernel and run debootstrap --second-stage. It starts to unpack packages, but after a few hours subprocesses start to fail with segfaults and illegal instructions.
The setup: Mac SE/30, standard but with 80MB of RAM and a 2GB CF card in an Adtron SCSI-to-PCMCIA adapter. Appears to work flawlessly as a Mac under System 7.1, hasn't given any hint of trouble.
Me: I'm very used to dealing with embedded Linux systems on armel and armhf architectures. Cross-compiling kernels and using debootstrap to create root fs is reasonably familiar territory for me.
Install process: CF card partitioned on mac with LIDO, then removed and put in to card reader on i386 machine to have files copied on to it (kernel on to HFS partition for Penguin, rootfs in to ext3 partition).
Kernel: 4.20.13 crossbuilt from source on
kernel.org,with default mac config. Earlier kernels all had unusable 5380 SCSI drivers.
Root filesystem set up from image at
using debootstrap --arch m68k --foreign --no-check-gpg sid ...
a few tweaks to /dev and /etc to get a shell prompt
Boots OK, rootfs mounts OK, kernel finds /bin/sh and I can remount / rw and run debootstrap --second-stage. It starts to work, glacially slowly of course, but after a few hours (and unpacking a dozen or so packages) things start to fail with segfaults and illegal instructions.
After this, the filesystem is hopelessly corrupted, with thousands of errors and in one case was unrecoverable by fsck.
My first suspect is bad RAM. For the last 12 hours or so the mac has been running memtest 64M (from Woody, I think) under the above kernel. It has revealed no errors but hasn't completed a full cycle yet (!).
Why am I using debootstrap? Partly for the sport of it, it's a path I know, and I had little luck with the Debian 4.0/etch m68k installer which didn't seem to know about Apple Partition Maps so I couldn't assign partitions to swap/root and so on.
Thank you for any thoughts or experiences,
Chris