Re: PPC subarches

[Jens Schmalzing <j.s@lmu.de>]

Hi,

Ross Vumbaca writes:

> >>Is the AmigaONE a subarch, or it's own flavor?

> > Please remind me, what processor does the thing have and how do
> > you boot it?

Thanks for the info.  To answer the original question: In the current
packaging scheme of the Debian kernels, flavours roughly correspond to
processor families and subarchs to booting methods.  The AmigaONE
falls in four different flavour/subarch combinations.

The processors are covered by the powerpc and power4 flavours, so
that's no problem.

If I understand your description correctly, both the direct boot from
uboot and the a1boot boot loader require uboot kernel images.  Support
for creating those could easily be added to the mkvmlinuz package,
which uses code from the kernel Makefiles to create bootable
compressed kernel images for other subarchs from the raw uncompressed
ELF file.  However, it only works out of the box for 2.6 kernels right
now, so if you want to use that you should really forward port your
patches.  And submit them upstream as well.

If you insist on using 2.4, this requires the creation of a separate
kernel-image-<version>-<flavour>-uboot package containing the uboot
kernel image for that kernel version and flavour.  Given that 2.4
support is slowly phasing out, this may not be worth the effort.

As far as the a1boot boot loader is concerned, you could either
package it separately and then find a sponsor to upload it to Debian,
or add it to the existing amiga-fdisk package through a patch.

Regards, Jens.

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