Re: Intention to drop sparc32 support for Lenny
On Mon, May 21, 2007 at 12:00:24PM +0200, Frans Pop wrote:
> The sparc32 port has been struggling for some time. Last month Jurij
> Smakov, currently the most active Debian Sparc porter, raised the question
> if support sparc32 should be dropped for Lenny [1].
I agree with this intent, as I wrote at the time.
> The main reason is the fact that sparc32 support is no longer being
> maintained upstream for the kernel [2]. A result of that is that the
> 2.6.21 kernel is currently broken, which forces the issue.
FYI, 2.6.21 is rock solid on my SS20 here. Do you consider it broken
just because of some cdrom issues? Or is there more?
Even though David does not actively support sparc32, he does push our
patches upstream and creates patches himself (and I for one am very
thankfull for that).
> Another reason is that dropping sparc32 support will allow optimization
> for sparc64 which will result in improved support for the modern sparc
> systems from Sun and Hitachi. Other distributions have already made this
> choice.
>
> Unless a group of people is willing to commit to providing the needed
> upstream kernel and toolchain support for sparc32, the Debian project
> will be forced to drop sparc32 for Lenny. Doing this early in the release
> cycle has the advantage of allowing sufficient time to work on optimizing
> support for sparc64.
>
> Given the current problems with sparc32 in the 2.6.21 kernel, the final
> decision on this will be made before the end of this month.
Please include your specific problem(s) here.
Cheers,
Martin Habets
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