(This mail is a combination of installation-report and status overview for the S/390 list.) Mostly thanks to the efforts of Bastian Blank, S/390 has now made the switch from 2.4 to 2.6 in the installer. The installer now also uses partman instead of partitioner and partconf. Both network device and DASD detection had to be made sysfs-aware. Together with the switch to partman, that means there have been some major changes. Additional testing is very welcome. I've done two test installs using the Hercules emulator. The results are below. Note: until 2.6.16 kernel packages have migrated to unstable, installations of testing will fail to reboot. Installations of unstable should work (barring any "normal" breakages in unstable). * Network configuration (CTC) Works fine. Wishlist: - Maybe we should remove the selected read device from the list when asking for the write device - Maybe we could suggest default values (first available device for read; the one following the selected read device for write) * DASD configuration During the first install this failed because the DASD modules were not loaded. Modprobing them initially did not work because depmod had not been run after loading the kernel module udeb. This was solved (worked around rather) by adding the dasd-modules udeb to the initrd so that initial udev runs will load them. The real solution would be to run depmod and rerun udev as part of dasd detection. Issue: - After selecting a dasd device there is no change of the status on the screen which makes it look as if no device has been selected yet. This is only a presentation bug as the selection in fact was done correctly. * Partitioning - general The old udebs used for partitioning (partitioner and partconf) are still in the archives and thus have to be skipped manually. Partitioner will probably fail; after you get back to the menu, select "Partition disks" instead. This is a temporary problem that will be fixed as soon as the udebs are removed from the archive. * Partitioning - partman-auto Don't use guided partitioning! Instead select "Manually edit partition table" in the first partman screen. - There are no recipes for S/390 which makes partman-auto use msdos disklabel and try to create a logical partition for swap. This fails miserably. - As guided partitioning currently only supports using one device, it's not much use for S/390 anyway as most installations tend to use multiple DASDs. For the last reason, we'll probably just disable partman-auto for S/390 for now. * Partitioning - manual partitioning Select the "s390" disklabel when using Hercules when creating a new partition table. I understand that msdos or gpt can be used in some cases. Issue: - When a new partition is created, it's name is shown strangely: LINUX.V^G^G^G^G^G^G.PART0001.NATI After committing the changes and restarting partman, it looks more normal though: LINUX.V0X0121.PART0001.NATIVE (Not sure where the 0121 comes from; the DASD I created the partition on was 0.0.0122!) * Base installation - kernel selection This is an existing issue, but worth mentioning anyway. Selection of the default kernel could be improved for S/390. Current selection uses the full kernel version (e.g. 2.6.16-2-s390) used in the installer. This means that: - if that kernel is not available, the fallback is not optimal; for example, if I install testing, the 2.6.15-1-s390x kernel will be selected by default (while hercules does not support s390x); - the installer will not install one of the meta packages which means that the user will not get automatic security updates if they have ABI changes. One thing to be aware of is that a new hardware configuration mechanism has been added for 2.6 kernels using the sysconfig-hardware package. The installer may (e.g. for CTC netdevices) create config files in directory: /etc/sysconfig/hardware/. Cheers, FJP
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