Re: Updated installation images for Debian Ports 2019-04-09
On 4/16/19 1:06 PM, jhcha54008 wrote:
> As far as I understand, it seems that booting a SCSI
> drive (disk, cdrom) on alpha needs a (non-free)
> firmware for the QLOGIC chip (see the thread
> following [1] for an example and the answer of Michael Cree)
I see. I wasn't aware of that, thanks.
> This firmware should be loaded somehow : embedded in
> the (tainted) kernel (as suggested in [1]), included
> in the initramfs or loaded from a floppy at boot time
> (if the floppy drive is still functional and there is
> a floppy driver in the kernel).
We cannot really include stuff in the kernel as the kernel
is the official Debian kernel and thus must therefore to the
Debian Free Software Guidelines (DFSG).
> These firmwares are packaged in : firmware-qlogic (non-free)
> which is not mirrored on ftp.ports.debian.org/debian-ports
> but on regular mirrors.
Yes, those firmware packages can be used by adding something like:
deb [arch=all] http://ftp.debian.org/debian unstable contrib non-free
to your sources.list. For the installer, we could include the firmware
on the CD the same way the unofficial Debian installation CDs do that
but that will probably not help us if the firmware is required to access
the firmware.
It would be interesting to test an old Debian installation CD when Alpha
was still an officially supported architecture. We need to find out how
it was done back then.
> Many thanks for all this work towards a (smoothly) working
> install CD for alpha - and especially for fixing the generic
> kernel and assembling the CD
> (I am not able to test currently, sorry)
You're welcome. It's a community effort, so I'll just say that on
behalf of everyone involved :).
Adrian
--
.''`. John Paul Adrian Glaubitz
: :' : Debian Developer - glaubitz@debian.org
`. `' Freie Universitaet Berlin - glaubitz@physik.fu-berlin.de
`- GPG: 62FF 8A75 84E0 2956 9546 0006 7426 3B37 F5B5 F913
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