Re: Debian Installer support for Sparc (was: Sun Enterprise 3500 - FC)

[Chris Newport <crn@netunix.com>]

On Sun, 13 Jul 2008, Frans Pop wrote:

> Date: Sun, 13 Jul 2008 08:01:52 +0200
> From: Frans Pop <elendil@planet.nl>
> To: debian-sparc@lists.debian.org
> Subject: Debian Installer support for Sparc (was: Sun Enterprise 3500 - FC)
>
> Giorgio Davanzo wrote:
> > we're stuck with the FC disk problem. We've found the alleged solution
> > to the problem, but it's not working:
> > http://www.mail-archive.com/debian-sparc@lists.debian.org/msg20888.html
> >
> > Someone suggested using microcode from SUN firmware (?)
> >
> > Did anyone ever solved the problem? If yes, could you give us a hint?
>
> From that thread it seems the main issue was missing drivers. This should
> been fixed since the Lenny Beta1 release of the installer [1]:
> http://bugs.debian.org/443504

An underlying issue here is that the soc.c and socal.c drivers are not
maintained and have not worked since 2.2.x
This means that the disk packs ( 3 drawers of 10 disks each ) usually
found on these machines will not work.

The solution is to use SCSI disk packs.