Re: Booting "Etch" on older hardware
Hi Mark,
On Thu, 31 Aug 2006, Mark Morgan Lloyd wrote:
For information I've just tried booting the Etch kernel on an 9-CPU SPARCserver
1000E (sun4d) and got
Booting Linux...
No cpu nodes, cannot continue
Program terminated
<#0> ok
I stress that I'm not complaining since my understanding is that other hardware
common on machines of this age hasn't worked with anything later than kernel 2.2
(i.e. Woody).
We are still planning to officially support sun4m machines (at least in
uniprocessor config) for etch. I don't know the sun4d status, as we did
not have any user reports so far with them (until now :-). sun4d upstream
kernel stuff has been largely unmaintained for a long time, but during the
last couple of months there has been some sun4d activity on the sparclinux
ML [0], and some fixes for it have been included upstream. You can look
for threads started by Raymond Burns, in case you are interested.
Therefore, your best bet is always to use the latest installer dailies,
which can be found at [1]. They currently feature 2.6.17 kernel.
It is also unclear whether the userspace will work correctly on your box.
We have already dropped support for sun4c at some point, because it did
not have the basic multiplication and division instruction implemented in
hardware. Emulating them was pretty slow, so it was deemed unreasonable to
support them anymore, so now some core libraries are compiled with
optimizations, which require at least sun4m to run. I'm not sure what the
status of this issue on sun4d, but you should not be surprised if suddenly
nothing works in userspace for you (you'll get 'illegal instruction'
messages a lot if it's not supported :-).
There were some attempts to revive the sun4c support, in which I have (not
very actively) participated. For more information you can have a look at
SparcSun4c page in wiki.d.o [2]. Information there is quite old, but I
don't think there were any developments since I've put it up.
[0] http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=linux-sparc&r=1&w=2
[1] http://www.debian.org/devel/debian-installer/
Scroll down to daily images section.
[2] http://wiki.debian.org/SparcSun4c
Best regards,
Jurij Smakov jurij@wooyd.org
Key: http://www.wooyd.org/pgpkey/ KeyID: C99E03CC
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