Re: sparc machines at debcamp
On Mon, 18 Apr 2005, Jan-Benedict Glaw wrote:
On Mon, 2005-04-18 02:08:36 +0200, Peter 'p2' De Schrijver <p2@mind.be>
wrote in message <[🔎] 20050418000836.GW5994@mind.be>:
We are looking to get some sparc machines sponsored for the debcamp for various
development tasks. In order to have an idea which architectures people want
to work on, we look for some projects or things people would be working on
involving sparc. If you have a request for a certain subarch or have some
idea involving sparc, please mail me. I will coordinate with Andreas as to what
we can actually get hold of.
I haven't switched on my sparc32 machines for quite some time, but I
remember there were some TODOs:
- Redo SILOs memory management to be able to load larger kernel
binaries
I do not know the status of that, but SILO definitely has its share of
problems other than inability to load large kernels. It fails to boot the
kernel on same machines, a representative bug is 261824 (boot failure on
SunFire 280R). Andres Salomon (dilinger@d.o) has made some debugging on it
recently (see the bug trail), but no solution was proposed so far.
- Check if current testing/unstable works w/o h/w mul/div
You probably have in mind the restoration of the sun4c support. Currently
glibc and some other libraries are built with v8 optimization, which uses
hardware mul/div, not available on sun4c. If you will manage to get a
sun4c machine for debcamp (such as Sparc IPX), someone can give a shot at
building the essential libraries without this optimization and trying to
boot it. I have built glibc and even a netboot image for it, but so far
nobody managed to netboot a sun4c machine using it. More information:
http://lists.debian.org/debian-sparc/2005/01/msg00152.html
http://www.wooyd.org/debian/sun4c/
- Get 2.6.x to run SMP
Ugh, AFAIK this is a tough one. Whoever is going to fiddle with that,
might be interested in looking at this thread, where at least partial
success was reported:
http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?t=110828128000001&r=1&w=2
Other important sparc topics:
* Kernel bug resulting in "Remapping the kernel... FP Disabled",
message, followed by returning to the PROM prompt. It seems like it
can happen on variety of Ultra machines, most often - when booting the
2.4.x kernel from CD-ROM. If someone manages to reproduce it during
debcamp, _any_ debugging information on it is welcome.
* Failure of the current 2.6 netboot images to boot on sparc32. It can be
a kernel bug or a SILO bug, or some combination thereof. During the boot
the initrd image cannot be mounted and boot fails. Should be reproducible
with any sparc32 hardware.
Best regards,
Jurij Smakov jurij@wooyd.org
Key: http://www.wooyd.org/pgpkey/ KeyID: C99E03CC
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