bug squashing and d-i hacking in Munich

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

Hi,

the Munich crowd of Debian developers are currently planning a small
informal meeting dedicated to bug squashing and d-i hacking.  Since it
will be taking place near yorick, the PowerMac G5 we've been talking
about, we will be able to address a number of current problems with
the kernel and d-i on powerpc.  The most pressing ones being, in my
humble opinion and in no particular order,

1. the PowerMac G5 crashing in the 2.4 serial driver, which other
   power4 boxen need built into the kernel for serial console support.
   Probably 2.6 is a solution, at least the serial drivers look like
   they've been greatly reworked.  I may get around to testing this
   soon.  Sven, which of these [1] options is the RS6k serial console
   you mentioned?

2. the current yaboot's inability to load kernels bigger than 4MB from
   the net.  In Bug#242348, Ethan stated clearly that this is not
   going to change until yaboot2, which in turn may be too late.  One
   can get the kernel well below 4MB by loading file systems as
   modules from an initrd, which brings us to

3. mkinitrd's problems of coping with kernels not built by Herbert
   himself.  In our case, the change is really small, see Bug#242653.
   I do hope it gets addressed by Herbert.

4. the lack of 2.6 kernel packages in general :)

Comments are very welcome, of course.

Regards, Jens.

[1] 
$ grep config.*CONSOLE drivers/serial/Kconfig 
config SERIAL_8250_CONSOLE
config SERIAL_AMBA_CONSOLE
config SERIAL_CLPS711X_CONSOLE
config SERIAL_DZ_CONSOLE
config SERIAL_21285_CONSOLE
config SERIAL_UART00_CONSOLE
config SERIAL_PXA_CONSOLE
config SERIAL_SA1100_CONSOLE
config SERIAL_SUNZILOG_CONSOLE
config SERIAL_SUNSU_CONSOLE
config SERIAL_MUX_CONSOLE
config PDC_CONSOLE
config SERIAL_SUNSAB_CONSOLE
config SERIAL_IP22_ZILOG_CONSOLE
config V850E_UART_CONSOLE
config SERIAL98_CONSOLE
config SERIAL_SH_SCI_CONSOLE
config SERIAL_AU1X00_CONSOLE
config SERIAL_CORE_CONSOLE
config SERIAL_PMACZILOG_CONSOLE


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