Re: powerpc d-i daily builds reactivated, use 2.6.12 kernels

[Sven Luther <sven.luther@wanadoo.fr>]

On Sun, Oct 09, 2005 at 10:08:08AM -0300, Rogério Brito wrote:
> On Oct 08 2005, Sven Luther wrote:
> > Yep. That said, once it is in non-free, it will migrate to testing
> > quickly enough.
> 
> Ok. What exactly needs to be done, i.e., which code needs to be removed?

The boot sector is divided in two parts, the first half is a structur ewith
data fields, and the second half is code. There is documentation about it on
the apple site, with a link on this list a year or so ago. The second half
needs to go. Just dd'ing zero's to it should be enough i think.

> > but nobody actually tested removing it, so we go about and wonder
> > about asking apple to free it,
> 
> I think that getting Apple to free it would be quite a task.

Indeed.

> > or reimplement it or something, maybe we can only get ride of it and
> > upload miboot to contrib ?
> 
> If it works without the proprietary code, why wouldn't it be possible to
> have it in main?

It needs code-warrior 4 for mac-os-classic to compile :)

> > I took the debian 2.6.12 -powerpc flavour and removed stuff until it
> > fit on a mibopot floppy. I disabled some modular stuff whih i maybe
> > didn't need to.
> 
> Ok, no problems with that.
> 
> > I think you should look at the .config, see what is missing for you,
> > and then check if we can remove other stuff and add those that are
> > missing for you.  Mostly the nfsroot stuff, and maybe have ext2
> > builtin, not sure if we can squeeze the scsi driver in also.
> 
> Where are the sources that you have been playing with?

apt-get source linux-2.6 in either sid or etch :)

> > ext2/ext3 have never been compiled in for debian 2.6 kernels, so ...
> 
> I said that I had ext2/ext3 compiled in my kernels and I would think
> that they would account for more space than the OW fbdevs.

Possibly.

> > One possibility in the 2.6.13/2.6.14 timeframe is the ability to
> > remove the non-apple chrp and prep code. Also, i am not sure if the
> > pmac-ide driver works on those machines, or if they use scsi only, in
> > this case we can try removing it also.
> 
> The box that I have here only has SCSI controllers, but I think that we
> could do what Free Software is best at: leave things that we don't think
> are necessary. If anybody is affected or cares to ask for support, then
> it probably isn't worth the effort of having it.

Well, fine but for the size constraint :)

> So, are you packaging 2.6.13 or still going with 2.6.12? In any case
> where can I find your latest efforts?

2.6.13 is in experimental, but as it drops devfs, and thus breaks
initrd-tools, it needs some work yet, 2.6.12 is the best bet. All of this can
be found in the debian-kernel svn repo (follow link from svn.debian.org), and
the debian-kernel mailing list.

Friendly,

Sven Luther