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Re: what is the whole purpose of kernel-image-di?



On Tue, Feb 06, 2001 at 09:09:28PM -0800, Joey Hess wrote:
> Ben Collins wrote:
> > I can understand it being the first milestone, but it seems to be the
> > only focus, and nothing is being considered as to how it affects other
> > ports.
> 
> That's not entirely true; I know of a group (who I cannot name or go
> into any detail on since they told me about this privatly) who is using
> the the basic debian-installer design and code as the base for something
> (very cool) involving installation on powerpc. The pa-risc porters were 
> also looking at using d-i some months back, but it wasn't far enough along
> at that point.

<blink>
Now I'm curious, curse you!

> Oh by the way Dan has been involved earlier in porting most of the d-i
> modules to the powerpc, or rather, compiling them on the powerpc. They
> seemed to work ok, but this was a while back, before the system did
> anything.

And I'm going to go back to this shortly, now that we've got an x86
bootable floppy.  PowerPC is not big on bootable floppies (or floppies
at all) but I can probably get a nice ramdisk going, and maybe a
netboot...

> This is one of the nice things about the debian-installer using standard debian
> sources that generate deb files: autobuilders automatically treat d-i modules
> just like regular packages. Anyone want to go check the build logs for 
> problems to see if some of the missing items failed to build or have just not
> need attempted yet?

libdetect.  Someone KILL libdetect.

It has fledgling PPC support, but it's (A) hacked together awfully (B)
a little lacking in correctness (C) nowhere near compiling.  I got it
to build once, with two hours work, but not function.

cdebconf.  Randolph, please do something about the warning and error I
showed you from the preinst (?)!

> b. Send me an appropriate kernel config and related information, and build
>    kernel-image-di once I integrate it.

2.4.1 kernel.org does not build on PPC.  Sigh.

> c. Some things such as network card involve hardware autodetection. We have
>    concentrated on i386 since it has the most variety (and crap) hardware.
>    udebs are generally available which let the user specify it manually
>    instead of using hardware autodetection. Other than those and some minor
>    crossovers, other architectures are on their own, and someone will have to
>    work on it.

Other architectures will want a radically simplified detection scheme. 
PPC (mostly) has no legacy ISA or such; everything should show up in
the kernel's PCI probes.  That should make things much nicer.

Dan

/--------------------------------\  /--------------------------------\
|       Daniel Jacobowitz        |__|        SCS Class of 2002       |
|   Debian GNU/Linux Developer    __    Carnegie Mellon University   |
|         dan@debian.org         |  |       dmj+@andrew.cmu.edu      |
\--------------------------------/  \--------------------------------/



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