debian-installer support for RiscPC - volunteers wanted
In February I asked which platforms debian-installer on ARM should
support [1]. A number of people were interested in RiscPC support.
RiscPC was supported in the past but nobody maintained that support
for sarge. At the moment, there's a 2.6 kernel in the archive and no
debian-installer support at all. I looked into RiscPC support a
little while ago but don't have time to work on this. This is
therefore a call for volunteers. If you want to see RiscPC support in
etch, please consider getting involved. I can give some advice on the
debian-installer changes that are needed but I don't have time to work
on it myself (neither do I have hardware).
Very roughly, the following needs to be done:
- The RiscPC kernel in Debian needs to be tested
(linux-image-2.6.16-1-rpc). It's unknown whether it actually
works. Apparently a patch for RTC support might be needed.
- d-i needs to be taught about RiscPC in various places; most of
this is trivial. One problem is that RiscPC has at least 4
different partition formats, something which I believe d-i
doesn't support. I'd just start with MS-DOS partition format
since this is supported.
- A "boot loader" needs to be written: basically a shell script that
mounts the adfs partition, looks for !linux and creates a proper
configuration file that'll boot Debian.
- Various hardware (SCSI/IDE extension cards) need to be tested.
Anyone interested?
[1] http://lists.debian.org/debian-arm/2006/02/msg00000.html
--
Martin Michlmayr
http://www.cyrius.com/
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