Chris Newport wrote:
On Sunday 13 July 2008, Chris Newport wrote: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.In that case I would say that the request to have them included in D-I was not correct and that we should remove them again. If I see no objections to that over the next few days, I will make that change.http://www.mail-archive.com/debian-sparc@lists.debian.org/msg20892.htmlsays socal works from vanilla sources, if the poster was building a kernel current at the time of his post then he can confirm they do work and should stay.1) The original poster needed the soc.c (Sun FC/25) driver which definitely has not worked since 2.2.x2) soc.c and socal.c (Sun FC/100) are both unmaintained
> 3) The above msg20892.html does not specify which kernel version > worked with socal.c, the poster only says "when I hand built kernels"
4) This mess has been discussed several times on the sparclinux list Is there any evidence that socal.c has worked with modern kernels ?.
Looking at the entire thread the OP (Dennis) was trying to boot from http://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/daily-builds/daily/arch-latest/sparc/iso-cd/ so it's reasonable to assume that he built the current kernel- even though he doesn't say so explicitly. A couple of days later http://www.mail-archive.com/debian-sparc%40lists.debian.org/msg20943.html (Bernd) reported that the relevant modules were now in the installer, but nobody has explicitly confirmed that they work.
The soc, socal and pluto drivers are being shipped but might not work: I don't have an E3500 or an external FC disc box for an E4500, so I can't check. However I suspect that these drivers are probably drifting in and out of the kernel and- in particular- the installation initrd on the basis that they build OK for 2.6 and nobody's explicitly raised a bug report stating that they're broken.
-- Mark Morgan Lloyd markMLl .AT. telemetry.co .DOT. uk [Opinions above are the author's, not those of his employers or colleagues]