Pre-RC3 installation reports on sparc

[Jurij Smakov <jurij@wooyd.org>]

Hi,

Below are the results of my testing of pre-RC3 images on sparc32 and 
sparc64. All installs were done using serial console. All the testing was 
done with:

sarge-sparc-netinst.iso from 
http://cdimage.debian.org/pub/cdimage-testing/daily/sparc/20050311
2.4 and 2.6 netboot images from
ftp://ftp.debian.org/debian/dists/sid/main/installer-sparc/current/images

sparc32: SparcStation 10, 150 MHz Ross Hypersparc CPU, 80 MB RAM 
-----------------------------------------------------------------
CD netinst install  - ok
2.4 netboot install - ok
2.6 netboot install - fails on initial boot with the error:

VFS: Mounted root (ext2 filesystem).
Freeing unused kernel memory: 124k freed
EXT2-fs error (device ram0): ext2_check_page: bad entry in directory #2:
unaligned directory entry - offset=0, inode=1887317007, rec_len=53961,
name_len=101
Warning: unable to open an initial console.
Kernel panic: No init found.  Try passing init= option to kernel.

I am pretty sure that this is due to genext2fs generating broken d-i 
initrd image. I'll investigate further.

sparc64 - Ultra 1, 143 MHz Ultrasparc CPU, 192 MB RAM
-----------------------------------------------------
CD netinst install  - ok
2.4 netboot install - ok
2.6 netboot install - ok, with some error messages during the initial 
boot:

RAMDISK: Compressed image found at block 0
RAMDISK: incomplete write (-28 != 32768) 8388608
VFS: Mounted root (ext2 filesystem).
Setting up filesystem, please wait ...
Starting system log daemon: syslogd, klogd.
cat: /sys/bus/pci/devices/*/class: No such file or directory
FATAL: Module usbkbd not found.
FATAL: Module hid not found.
FATAL: Module usbhid not found.
FATAL: Module usbserial not found.

So it looks like something is wrong with (ext2) initrd image again (even 
though the error is non-fatal) and the USB-related modules cannot be 
loaded from initrd. This probably means that USB keyboards/mice will not 
work with this install (this machine does not have any USB ports)

Common notes
------------
On all serial console installs following seemingly harmless error/warning 
messages were noted:

* On initial boot: unimplemented Sparc system call 188
* Before the first d-i screen comes up:
  (process:144): ERROR **: Couldnt get a file descriptor referring to the console
* After second stage has booted:
  error: Unable to switch charset mapping to ISO-8859-1 with terminal 'serial'
  warning: Disabling unsupported locale 'en_US'.
* When booting from the netinst CD and not choosing any extra apt sources:
  mdetect, read-edid packages are not found.
* After the second stage has finished, before the login prompt appears:
  zs_close: bad serial port count; tty->count is 1, info->count is 3 (or 4)
  This is not displayed for the 2.6 netboot.

Best regards,

Jurij Smakov                                        jurij@wooyd.org
Key: http://www.wooyd.org/pgpkey/                   KeyID: C99E03CC