debian-installer and kernel status (pre- and post-sarge) on sparc
Hello,
It appears, that debian-installer (d-i) team and the release team pretty
much made up their minds that there will be no other significant kernel
updates for d-i before sarge. That means that RC3 is going to become the
final d-i release for sarge. Most serious implication for sparc is that we
will not be able to fix the 2.4.27 kernel shipped on RC3 CD images, which
does not seem to work on Blades 100/150 (due to the problems with ALI IDE
controller) and 1500 (unknown clock chip). A fixed kernel for the latter
problem (kernel-image-2.4.27-2-sparc64 with version 2.4.27-9) with David
Miller's patches applied has been uploaded yesterday and is now available
in unstable. Under the normal circumstances it would get picked up by the
sid_d-i daily builds, however gluck.d.o (which was building the dailies)
has died yesterday :-/, so it will take another few days for a CD image
with the kernel working on Blade 1500 to be produced (sorry, Dave!).
The ALI IDE problem cannot be solved that easily. I was able to find a
workaround by changing the kernel config (thanks to Clint Adams and
Matthias Mertz for testing it), but these changes are ABI-breaking,
and thus it is very unlikely that 2.4.27 kernels containing these fixes
will ever make it into the archive. IMHO, the best way to deal with it is
to build unofficial netinst CD image, which will (hopefully) work on Blade
100/150. Unfortunately, I do not have the infrastracture in place to build
this image myself (it requires a local archive mirror), but either Frans
Pop (of d-i team) or Andres Salomon (of debian-kernel team) should be able
to do that. If anyone wants to give it a shot, all the components (initrd,
kernel-image debs and various udebs) for this image are available at [0].
It looks like we might have another shot at updating the 2.6.8 kernel for
d-i, since the release team would like to see bug #288180 fixed in d-i
kernels. I currently do not have any patches pending for that kernel,
except the possible fix for sunsab serial driver, discussed in the "Weird
Mouse Behaviour with 2.6" thread (it would be nice if people would confirm
that it does the Right Thing). If you think that some important fix is
forgotten, please let me know.
Briefly on the post-sarge plans. Common consensus between debian-kernel
and release team members appears to be that there is not too much sense in
supporting the 2.4.x series of kernels after sarge is released (security
updates for the 2.4 kernel which ships with sarge will, of course, be
provided). Currently I don't see any reason which would force us to keep
the 2.4.x post-sarge (except, possibly, the fact that 2.6 netboot images
fail to boot on sparc32 currently). If you see a reason of why we would
want 2.4 kernels after sarge, feel free to share it.
[0] http://www.wooyd.org/debian/d-i/
Best regards,
Jurij Smakov jurij@wooyd.org
Key: http://www.wooyd.org/pgpkey/ KeyID: C99E03CC
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