Re: Sarge may be last Debian release for 32 bit sparc systems
Sorry to rattle up old dust here...
On Mon, Jul 25, 2005 at 09:34:03PM -0400, Jurij Smakov wrote:
> >Reportedly, current 2.6 kernels do not work *at all* on sun4m. This
> >according to Jurij Smakov, who appears to currently be the sparc kernel
> >maintainer in Debian.
>
> Yes, indeed I could not make it work with neither 2.6.11 or 2.6.12
> kernels. It would not boot with initrd, debugging showed that basic memory
> copying routines are broken. Removing initrd support (initial plan
> for 2.6.12) actually made it possible to boot, but it did not eliminate
> the problems, so I was still occasionally triggering a filesystem
> corruption in my tests. In the end we decided not to build the sparc32
> kernel images for 2.6.12 release, so the first step towards dropping it
> has already been done.
Have you also checked for the filesystem corruption with stock kernels?
With what filesystems/disks do you see this? 2.6.10 was still okay, right?
> It also appears that the success or failure to boot
> is correlated with positions of memory chips in the slots, not really an
> acceptable situation.
I remember having this issue waay back in the 2.6.0 prereleases. After
rearanging the memory according to the official sun documentation it always
boots fine. Are you seeing intermittend boot problems, or is it just that
you can't plug in the memory anywhere you want?
> I am willing to fiddle with kernel options and available patches, but I'm
> really not hardcore enough to keep the sparc32 afloat. So unless someone
> upstream will start actively working on it again, I see dropping support
> for it as inevitable.
I have no problem testing any debian kernels you build, but I normally run
stock kernels (usually without problems). I only have a SS20 with a SuperSparc,
so I cannot test HyperSparc specific issues. Besides this I don't use
initrd, so that's another complication out of the way.
The latest kernel I run now is 2.6.10, but will start testing 2.6.13 soon.
>From the mails it is not clear to me wether the problems you're reported
are specific to Hypersparc or not. Do you have any idea on this?
Can someone point me to the extra patches included in this debian-kernel
SVN thing? I don't know svn, so a web link or a tarball would be best for
me. I could inspect these patches once or twice, but have no intention of
checking them all the time.
Best regards,
--
Martin
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