Re: Sparc d-i terminal weirdness?

[Frans Pop <elendil@planet.nl>]

On Monday 03 November 2008, Mike Grice wrote:
> > Does the Etch version of the installer work?
>
> No.  I'm actually doing a netboot into a SUN LDOM.  This shouldn't be
> any different from a normal SPARC install, except that the disk and
> net are accessed through new modules.  The reason I was rolling my own
> d-i is because the base lenny installer (the rc) does not have these
> two modules, sunvnet and sunvdc, installed.  The rc netboot image does
> work as expected, up until the point it (correctly) can't find the
> network card.

I've checked and AFAICT these modules are currently not enabled in the 
kernel-image packages for Lenny. This means that, to get this supported 
in the installer, you'll have to do two things:
- file a wishlist bug report against linux-2.6 requesting those modules
  to be activated for sparc
- wait until you get an acknowledgement for that report with the bug
  number
- file a second wishlist BR against linux-kernel-di-sparc-2.6 requesting
  to include the modules in the installer with a reference to the first
  bug report

> This is weird.  I have booted with BOOT_DEBUG before, but I didn't
> think to run the scripts manually.  Strangely, if I run them manually,
> it works (although the display looks a bit corrupted (like its not
> redrawn properly, but fine enough to use by hand)).

Are you sure you ran the scripts the same way as during init? Some scripts 
need to be sourced instead of called normally. As you can get further by 
doing things manually, I'd expect it to be possible to trace the problem 
spot.

I have absolutely no ideas about this. In cases like this it's basically 
up to the person who sees the problem to try to trace its origin. You 
could try asking on the debian-sparc mailing list or even the sparc list 
where kernel developers hang out (sparclinux AT vger.kernel.org).

I don't have access to a Sparc LDOM, but even if I did I would not look 
into this myself beyond my general suggestions up to this point as I 
don't consider myself a sparc porter.
If you do find out what the cause of the problem is, please let us know. 
If there is something we can change in the installer to fix it or work 
around it, we will be most happy to do so.

Cheers,
FJP