Re: AmigaONE && Debian (unstable?)
On Mon, Jun 07, 2004 at 11:51:43AM +0200, Ole-Egil Hvitmyren wrote:
> Jens Schmalzing wrote:
> >Hi,
> >
> >Turbo Fredriksson writes:
> >
> >
> >>Anyone have an idea how to get 'official' support for the AmigaONE
> >>in Debian GNU/Linux?
> >
> >
> >Implement it.
> >
> >If the kernel source needs patching, try to get the patch into the
> >main kernel.org tree, or the Debian kernel-source package, or the
> >Debian kernel-patch-powerpc package. If there is a kernel-image
> >package already that should work (-powerpc, I presume?) but doesn't,
> >find out how the .config itself, or the support scripts mkinitrd and
> >mkvmlinuz need to be changed.
>
> The firmware is U-Boot, so the kernel needs a bit of patching. Most of
> the guys working on the Linux kernel got tied up in writing stuff for
> AmigaOS4. It seems to me that unless one happens to be IBM or one of the
> other big players getting more than a few lines into any of the places
> you mention is quite an undertaking :-(
Well, if you never submit patches, there is serious little chance that
they will get accepted. I still remember those third party amiga-fdisk
packages that never got contributed back in any way for example.
> U-Boot comes with a tool that does more or less the same as mkvmlinuz,
> called mkimage (takes in an elf and an optional ramdisk image and
> outputs a bootable image)
See, another thing that could have been usefull for everyone involved
and was hidden.
> Things I know that needs a patch:
>
> kernel-package (subarch in script plus new config-file. I've been using
> kernel-package on this subarch for almost a year, so this _shouldn't_ be
> difficult to implement ;-) )
>
> kernel-patch-powerpc (unfortunately, we don't have anything later than
> 2.4.22 at the moment. Trying to follow the kernel development with a
> small team and no inside contacts feels like ice skating uphill)
At least 2.4.25/26 should be there, there will be no older kernel
version in sarge.
> debian-installer (at least we had to make our own version of bf, I
> presume d-i won't accept an unknown machine from /proc/cpuinfo either?)
Yep, but it is in rc status now, january was the right time to work on
this.
> amiga-fdisk (new extensions to RDB standard means running amiga-fdisk on
> the harddrive will disable dual-booting. I can provide the necessary
> bits. Quite small patch, actually)
amiga-fdisk was last modified in 2001 or so, and your changes never
contributed back. But if you want debian-installer support, you need
parted. I believe that parted amiga partition support i wrote is already
amigaone friendly, never tested, obviously, as there is no amiaos4 yet,
and the only amigaone i saw was not even able to boot debian without
oopsing, but then it was probably a early devel board or something.
> mkuboot (or something along those lines, mkimage from U-Boot packaged so
> people can run it on their own machines instead of mkvmlinuz).
Why not contribute the code necessary to mkvmlinuz ?
> So the question basically boils down to this:
> Where is the right place to START?
A bit late i believe. All the above need to be done, but it is hardly
shortly before the sarge release that it is the right thing for that.
Now, just start submitting bug reports with patches for the above
problems would be a good start. About d-i, sincerely i wish you luck, i
believe that you probably need many weeks if not month of work to have
it done, especially at this stage and due to the modular development
style of d-i. But please go ahead.
Friendly,
Sven Luther
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