2.6.12 testers wanted
Hi,
The kernel team is currently preparing the release of kernel 2.6.12. I
have been testing the new release on sparc, with some mixed results.
For sparc64 everything seems to look good, the kernel boots fine on my
testing machine(s) and appears to function properly. I've received a
report of it not booting on Netra X1, however the person who reported it
have come up with a working kernel config. This config differs a bit from
the one used in official kernels, so I hope that we'll be able to find the
problem fairly soon. Note that tg3 driver has been readded to 2.6.12
Debian kernel source.
On sparc32 things do not look good at all. First, all attempts to boot an
initrd-enabled kernel have failed miserably, with kernel failing to mount
initrd and subsequently panicking. Few days ago I have disabled initrd
support and finally managed to get kernel to boot on my SS10 with
HyperSparc CPU. Unfortunately, it appears to occasionally corrupt the
filesystem under heavy memory/disk activity (such as sarge to sid
upgrade). So, at this moment I am not sure whether it makes sense to build
the sparc32 debs for 2.6.12 at all, as the kernel is pretty badly broken.
It might be though, that the issues are specific to the Hypersparc CPU, so
the images might work fine for others.
In order to make a more informed decision about sparc32 and make sure
that everything is fine on sparc64, it would be great if the preliminary
debs would receive testing on a wider variety of hardware. Note, that
testing the sparc32 image may COMPLETELY BREAK your system, so backup the
data on the machine, if it is of any value. Even though there are
currently now known issues on sparc64, backing up important stuff is
always useful when testing the new kernels. The kernel images are
available at
http://www.wooyd.org/debian/kernels/2.6/
Please report your experiences either by replying to this thread, or to
the SparcKernelStatus wiki page at
http://wiki.debian.net/?SparcKernelStatus
Thanks for your cooperation,
Jurij Smakov jurij@wooyd.org
Key: http://www.wooyd.org/pgpkey/ KeyID: C99E03CC
P.S. Don't be alarmed by the fact that the packages are called linux-image
now, instead of kernel-image. This renaming is part of the transition to a
common kernel packaging scheme, in which all the kernel debs are built
from the same source package.
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