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Re: Bug#745938: FWIW -- I consider sparc useful, pity if its support ends completely

Le 29/04/2014 12:15, Joël BERTRAND a écrit :

Le 29/04/2014 11:50, Ansgar Burchardt a écrit :

Hi,


    Hello,


On 04/29/2014 04:14 AM, Yaroslav Halchenko wrote:

With Debian dropping support for sparc unfortunately I would need to
stop providing similar "unique" testing opportunity for those projects, 
which would not be the end of the world, but kinda a pity since sparcs
seems to be quite nice and which helped to gain more "geeky gratitude"
for Debian being somewhat unique in its spread of support.


Having people find the sparc port useful or using it is however not
enough to maintain it. There needs to be a commitment to fix issues and
to respond to inquiries about the current status. However there is
currently *nobody* doing this as demonstrated by the lack of replies to
the release teams concerns (see all the "bits from the release team"
mails on debian-devel-announce@ since the Wheezy release).

Axel Beckert was the only one who stepped up as a porter for sparc, but
he cannot look into the (existing) toolchain and kernel issues[1].

   [1] <https://lists.debian.org/debian-sparc/2014/04/msg00034.html>
It's the main problem. There are too much kernel issues to use Linux on sparc/sparc64. Last sparc kernel maintainers were leon4 developers and last sparc64 stable kernel was 2.6.32. I have a lot of sparc/sparc64 servers (sun4u _and_ sun4v) and today, no one is stable enough. All servers randomly crash and I have a lot of strange issues with LSI SAS adapters on Txxxx.
We can do best effort to remain sparc/sparc64 alive, but without a real effort to keep kernel usable and stable, there is no solution.
Today, only four T1000 runs on Linux. I think that I will reinstall these servers with xBSD as soon as possible. 


Hi Joël, could you point the bugs for the kernel that is plagging you.
Maybe, we can do a call-to-arm on lkml to check if old porter wants to revive the flame or attract some new one.
As a matter of fact, two new bugs have been unveiled with a little bit of time that shows only on sparc. 
If think there is still knowledge inside the community.
I'll step up but I don't have much knowledge about the internals of SPARC, however, I spend more than my share on linux. 
I'm neither dd nor d-porter.
I'm willing to learn.

Cheers.

Seb
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