My experience: sparc status? A cry for information, and an offer to , help
Hello,
I have just got a working sparclinux installed on an old sun4c
SS2, and I had many of your problems. Generally speaking, I've found
that people with sun4m machines are in better shape. It seems that
not everything gets tested on a sun4c, probably because developers don't
have access to any.
> 1) The boot disks don't work. Not an issue for me, but important to some
> people.
They did not work so well for me either. There are two areas of
difficulty I have noticed, and they deal with SILO. First of all,
I've found that the timer mechanisim screwed things up for me. Signs
that this is happening could be "Watchdog reset" or "Memory address
is not aligned" from the PROM. If you have a v2 prom, you can
always get arond the timer:
ok boot floopy Linux
... and the PROM will pass the arg. Linux to SILO which will load the
imagename Linux w/o starting the timer.
Second problem I've seen is that newer versions of SILO don't always
read the ext2 filesystem from a floppy drive. This is a problem
when SILO is looking for where physically on the floppy /etc/silo.conf
can be found, as well as the actual kernel. If you can put the
kernel somewhere on the hard drive and boot it that way, that's
what worked for me:
ok boot floppy /sbus/esp/sd@3,0;1/linux root=/dev/fd0 load_ramdisk=1
(continued from above line) prompt_ramdisk=1
This assumes that you have your linux kernel on scsi disk 3,
partition 1, in the root directory, named linux
> 3) 'ldd' doesn't work - and possibly other components of ld-linux.so.
> Random segfaults are probably related to this. This makes packaged
> compilation tricky, since dpkg-shlibs won't work.
Hmm... try using the new 2.1.109 kernel from CVS, compile it with
gcc version 2.7.2.x (later versions and egcs will give you the
infamous SCSI error messages at boot time for anyone with old hardware).
This fixed my ldd problems and I can now execute /lib/ld-linux.so.2
normally, without a segfault.
Hope that helps,
Kevin
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