Re: Sarge on SPARCstations etc.
* Frans Pop <elendil@planet.nl> on Thu, 1 Mar 2007 at 15:50 +0100:
> On Thursday 01 March 2007 15:24, Mark Morgan Lloyd wrote:
> > This is purely for information in case nobody else has checked
> > recently. I'm not complaining, I'm not expecting anybody to fix things.
> > OTOH since Sarge is the last Debian likely to be qualified for 32-bit
> > SPARC it's a pity usability is decaying.
>
> This is not true. Etch _will_ support sparc32, though only sun4m systems.
Feel I have to weigh in here as well, since I've been trying to get Etch
installed on my SS20. Although sporting the most thought-through installer;
which actually detects your Quad Sbus NICs and lets you use them instead of the
onboard Happymeal 10BaseT (as opposed to, say AuroraLinux), the installer
crashes the system right after it inserts the esp scsi module.
I've verified this with a couple tftp images (including the latest ones I could
find). From what I've been hearing there are several issues with sparc on 2.6
(which apparently is especially true for older 32-bit systems such as sun4m)
Anyway--the images:
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 3942360 Mar 5 2006 debian-sparc-2.6-2.tftpboot
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 4426396 Aug 8 2006 debian-sparc-2.6-3.tftpboot
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 4414768 Nov 3 17:27 debian-sparc-2.6-4.tftpboot
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 3947260 Mar 7 2005 debian-sparc-2.6.tftpboot
martin@overkill ~ $ md5sum /home/diskless/debian*
3ae33dfe445b8a543331d15958b5c165 /home/diskless/debian-sparc-2.6-2.tftpboot
c293b9ffa5a0e580aa0c121b39f356a6 /home/diskless/debian-sparc-2.6-3.tftpboot
3cc130c924a2f8d10c182f79eead23a1 /home/diskless/debian-sparc-2.6-4.tftpboot
7f52592b5aff94c2973f1adae1a163aa /home/diskless/debian-sparc-2.6.tftpboot
I know there is something iffy going on with the supplied modules for sparc32 as
the Gentoo image (being 2.4-based) successfully inserts the esp driver.
Obviously this could very well be kernel-related.
Side note:
I also put OpenBSD 4.0 on it without problems (installation-wise); but it seems
to have stability issues.
Regrettably I do not have the console output handy as I'm not in front of the
system right now. I remember though that it started probing the bus, and after
about 30-40 seconds the system froze.
--
-=-=- Martin Andersen =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- EMail: martin.andersen@ieee.org =-=-=-=-
-=-=- Cellphone: +47 906 45 948 -=- http://www.ementor.no =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
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