Re: Debian Sparc Buildd
On Tue, 15 Mar 2005, Blars Blarson wrote:
As far as I understand, the main problems with sparc are not
availability of hardware.
[skip]
There have been kernel porting issues, and I beleive additional help
could be used there.
Debian-installer could use more testing, especially on newer systems.
USB keyboards and other hardware not in 5-year old workstations are
areas that most need testing.
sun4c/sun4d are not being supported in sarge, (at least for new
installs) and it looks like sun4m (the last sparc32) will not be in
etch even if sparc is a release architecture.
While I would not mind having a faster machine available for building
testing/debugging kernels, I agree with Blars that the lack of hardware
may hardly be considered a bottleneck. Comments about other points:
* Kernel situation seems to be more or less ok at the moment. Sparc kernel
images are built from the common kernel-source, and all the patches we
produce get promptly accepted upstream in most cases (thanks to Dave
Miller and William Lee Irwin III for doing a good job!). It would be nice
if people would be more active in testing new kernel - see the wiki page
at [0] on how to help.
* Situation with d-i is not too bad either, at least on lower end
hardware, for which we can do a lot of testing. Some newer machines are
seriously crippled by silo/kernel bugs like 261824, 267428, 267791,
281641. These problems are very hard to debug, because they are not easily
reproducible (I've never seen one on my hardware) and happen early in the
booting sequence. What is needed here is someone who can reproduce the
bugs AND does not mind rolling up the sleeves a bit in an attempt to fix
them :-). I have made a few offers to help with debugging these problems
in the past, never successfully.
* There has been no activity in the sun4c front for a while. A while ago
someone informed me of the intention to work on it, but I guess it didn't
pan out. I don't have any such hardware myself. If someone would like to
pick it up, [1] contains a glibc and a netboot image, which should work on
sun4c (they are compiled without the v8 optimizations).
[0] http://wiki.debian.net/?SparcKernelStatus
[1] http://www.wooyd.org/debian/sun4c/
Best regards,
Jurij Smakov jurij@wooyd.org
Key: http://www.wooyd.org/pgpkey/ KeyID: C99E03CC
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