Re: Status of debian-installer on PPC64
* Anton Blanchard <anton@samba.org> [2004-03-03 23:21]:
[...]
> > Also, are you generally interested in helping with our PPC64 port? As
> > I see it, this needs to be done to get the PPC64 port started:
>
> Sure Im willing to help.
>
> > - get a working 32bit kernel for POWER3 and POWER4
> > - get 64bit toolchain support (GCC, etc). Guido Guenther
> > <agx@sigxcpu.org> is working on this for MIPS64, so there's
> > some effort to be shared. Guido knows PPC as well, but
> > doesn't have the time to do it.
> > - get a working 64bit kernel
> > - add a 64 bit support to glibc, I guess.
>
> An overview of the current status:
>
> - 64bit 2.6 (straight from Linus) should compile and boot on G5, pseries
> and iseries (there is one iseries and one pseries driver that is on
> its way into the kernel, hopefully in the next week or so). (Note
> while 32bit will boot on power3 and g5, its unlikely to work on POWER4
> eg 615).
>
> - binutils works with 64bit, in fact the current 32bit binutils in
> debian has 64bit support enabled (I requested that a while ago).
>
> - gcc-3.3 requires patches. This is the sticking point at the moment.
> The current repository for this is the SUSE 3.3 hammer branch, it
> includes all the required 64bit support as well. Does debian have a
> x86-64 toolchain? If so its probably the hammer branch and we can
> share with those packages. If not we can handle it a number of ways
> (eg patch against 3.3 mainline).
>
> - My understanding is gcc-3.4 will have all the necessary patches.
>
> - glibc works with 64bit
>
> On a related topic, 32bit ppc currently has no NPTL libc build because
> some of the changes did not make it into gcc-3.3. Again the gcc-3.3
> hammer branch or gcc-3.4 have the bits. I can understand the guys not
> wanting to upset too much before the next release but we need to get
> NPTL support in or we will be behind x64, x86-64, s390 and ia64. The
> suggestion was to do some experimental gcc-3.3-hammer + libc6-nptl
> packages. Maybe this could tie in with our ppc64 toolchains.
>
> Other than that, we need to iron out the installer issues:
>
> - making bootable cdroms. I can help with this, there is a bit of black
> magic to making pseries bootable cds. G5 bootable should just work
>
> - lots of small installer bugs, like no fdisk (only the pmac-fdisk)
Forwarded for the benefit of -powerpc.
--
Martin Michlmayr
leader@debian.org
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