Re: worrying about sparc/alpha boot floppies

[Steve Dunham <dunham@cse.msu.edu>]

Jules Bean <jmlb2@hermes.cam.ac.uk> writes:

> On 29 Jan 1999, Adam Di Carlo wrote:
> 
> > 
> > I'm a little worried that we don't have up-to-date boot-floppies for
> > Alpha and Sparc.  Is there a plan to release these platforms a little
> > later than the x86 (and m68k?) release date?

> Eric Delaunay (sp?) is working on sparc boot-floppies.

I believe he is working on a CDROM image too.  Eric, are you still
planning on making the CDROM boot on all sparc machines?  I think the
best plan would be:

  get the sparc64 kernel/module images from me
  build the sparc and sparc64 resc/drv images and CDROM image 
  Verify that the CDROM works on "sparc" architectures
  Let me download the CDROM, burn it onto a CD/RW and verify on sparc64
   systems.

Brian (and Chris), it would be nice if we could get a modified
binutils into slink/sparc.  I need to patch the sparc64 support to
work correctly and change the rules file to include sparc64 support
when compiled on the sparc architecture.  This is necessary to allow
UltraSparc kernels to be compiled.  I've been using the patched
version to generate both sparc64 kernels and sparc executables for
quite a while (a lot of packages in slink were compiled on my system),
and the patches don't affect other architectures.

I can either upload an NMU of the binutils source package, or fork off
a binutils-sparc source package with the new version.  Any preferences?


Also, if anybody is doing a 2.2.1-sparc kernel source package, I'd
appreciate if they would get in touch with me.  I'd like to get the
thing to generate both sparc64 and sparc kernels (the can both be
built on any sparc machine if you have egcs64 and the right binutils
installed.)


Steve
dunham@cse.msu.edu