Christian Perrier wrote: > Unfortunately, and as far as I can tell, there hasn't been much > activity and interaction with the d-i team about this. So, it turns > out that the 2.6/installer combination is very likely to be nearly > untested. Having hppa installs be really tested was already a > challenge given the obvious low interest in that architecture (no > offense intended, just a conclusiong taken from months following > debian-boot). > > I'm not even sure that hppa installs are really well tested, by the > way. Joey could tell more and this probably needs more input from him. > He may even correct me if I'm completely wrong. Hppa 2.6 support was included in rc2, but only barely: netboot, a netboot mini.iso, and cdrom initrds that were not included on the rc2 CD images. I have not seen anyone actually using that stuff from rc2. I run automatic installation tests on an a500 every night, with the 2.4 and 2.6 kernels, but only netboot and only that one model. It's worked fine in my testing, although I see some intermittent kernel crashes with 2.6, which may just be a problem with my machine (kills maybe 10% of installs though I've not analysed the failure logs much). So all I can say for sure about d-i 2.6 is that it works for netboot on one model of machine for basic installs. I don't have much depth or breadth of information. But then, we don't have much more information about how well 2.4 works on hppa. What we do know is that it pretty much sucks, at least 50% of installation reports show it failing. Freezes in the middle of debootstrap in CD installs with 2.4 have been reported quite a lot for the last 10 months. But really the available info is slim. Some recent reports of failure include #287606 (which has 2.6 failing too), #282532, #271011, and #269278 (two people seeing the CD copy freeze), #265420, #264433 (hang at boot from CD). That takes us back to August. In the same time period I see more or less successful reports #263207, and #283754 (mine). Um, that's all. I'll trust the hppa kernel guys if they think 2.6 is likely to improve these stats. What I'm most fearful of is that we don't know if d-i works at all on hppa for CD installs with 2.6. As far as I know the closest thing to CD install ever was a few partial installs bdale did that way while working on hppa 2.6 support in d-i. There could be any number of problems that we've yet to find in getting that sorted out and really working; I'd be much more comfortable with this whole thing if we had 2.6 hppa cd images (it has to be a separate image afaik due to palo's inflexability), and if we knew they worked at least as well as netboot works. Given how few installation reports we get about hppa at all, I don't share vorlon's caution as far as not wanting to switch to 2.6 as default or drop 2.4 until it's been fully tested in a d-i release. But I'm going to have to see it work, and seem to work on as many machines as 2.4 before I can support it. > Well, again, Joey Hess could probably tell more but even if what you > mention above has been explained, not having enough interaction > between the hppa kernel team and the d-i team is quite likely to be > the real problem here. It's been no secret that the 2.4 kernel was not in good shape and hppa folk were happier with 2.6. But this idea of just dropping 2.4 altogether was a suprise to me. (FWIW, I'm also concerned that the kernel team (except for joshk and horms) has back-burnered 2.4 now for all other arches too.) > Just telling "well, guys, we want to abandon 2.4 ASAP" is probably not > enough and is quite likely to be either ignored or missed if noone > motivated jumps in debian-boot and discusses this issue more > deeply. After all, not everyone (and maybe noone) in the d-i team is > thinking daily about hppa installs... We have maybe two people, each of whom are more involved in 3 or 4 other arches. Not enough attention to get hppa 2.6 support fully done in time for rc2 even though it was one of a few things I delayed that release over for 2 or 3 weeks. -- see shy jo
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