Alpha boot floppies
Enrique Zanardi writes:
> Hello Loic.
>
> [...]
> Also, as I haven't read any comment from the Debian/Alpha team there yet,
> I remind you that boot-floppies related discussions are taking place on
> debian-boot@lists.debian.org, a recently created list. I would like
> boot-floppies maintainers for every port to subscribe to that list so
> that we can share info and coordinate development.
> [...]
> If everything goes well tomorrow, I may have access to that Alpha machine
> to help porting efforts. Unfortunately I won't be able to do much
> boot-floppies related development there, as the machine is ~70 Km from
> here, but compiling/testing text-based apps (and perhaps some light X
> apps) should be OK.
Hi Enrique,
I am actually subscribed to the debian-boot mailing-list, you haven't
heard from me for a long time because I haven't done anything
significant work or testing on the boot-floppies for about two
months.
My last message a long time ago to debian-boot was actually the
commit messages for some Alpha patches (and a few generic).
I have a few mods that I have not yet incorporated to the CVS tree
because they were workaround for some strange problems with the Alpha
binutils that may not be relevant anymore now (basically strip was
creating huge files with holes, and while copying the libs to the
root.bin, I needed to add some treatement for sparse files).
If all goes well, I plan to generate a new set this week-end.
There is also a non-trivial job that needs to be done for the Alpha:
the hard-disk boot installation, I may not be able to complete that
this W.E., the fact that on machine with SRM, you cannot use standard
PC partitioning make it more difficult.
I was wondering if it would be better to add special support in the
kernel/cfdisk/fdisk to put optionally the PC partitioning info at a
different place on the boot sector (to avoid conflicting with the SRM
boot info). So people coming for the Linux/x86 world do not need to
learn about BSD labeling. We can add a small program that allow to put
both PC partitioning and BSD labeling in the first sectors, so that
even unpatched kernels works well after installation. Altough people
should be warned about not trying to modify the partition one time
using BSD labeling, and one time using PC partitioning, only insane
people would do that without questioning themselves.
An other problem with the Alpha is the fact we need a different rescue
disks for the ten or so architectures. Altough we had a bunch of
success on different architectures reported, I will try to generate a
sort of generic rescue disks, using a 2.1 kernel that has the
possibility of being subarch-independant. That will work only for SRM
console machine, because for the others you need a specific MILO
anyway.
Note also that I have very rarely access to the console of Alpha, so I
generally only test the boot-floppies running dinstall in a chroot
environment, (actually in the modify-compile-test cycle it is very
convenient, but you cannot test completely everything:-().
Regards,
Loic
Reply to: