Re: Creating sparc64 installation images
On 25/12/15 08:58, Mark Morgan Lloyd wrote:
> John Paul Adrian Glaubitz wrote:
>> On 12/24/2015 09:34 PM, Wim Coekaerts wrote:
>>> Silo works great
>>
>> I have tested it on Linux only so far, but without a single issue!
>>
Jose and I spent soooo many weeks getting that to work (mostly Jose for the
assembler stuff). Unaligned access problems galore and it's not trivial to
figure out when your in the first stages of booting and have no usable debugger
to work with.
>>> We are very close to finishing grub2 for sparc as well and once
>>> that's tested we are going to switch to grub2 for Linux for sparc
>>> so then we can do netboot
-groan- I'm being flogged to death already about grub2
I'd like to get grub2 to accept passing boot arguments similar to silo though.
ie {0} ok boot linux_normal nomsi ip=dhcp ks=http://x.y.z/lazy_sod.ks
rather than having to crack open the menu entry and edit it from console. It was
nice to be able to edit boot params on the fly with eeprom from inside linux and
reboot... but I'm lazy that way)
There are a few more items not fixed yet that relate to booting solaris from
grub2 but they're on the back burner as getting Linux going is the priority for
the moment (which it does do)
>>
>> Wow, that's actually awesome to hear! Great work!
>>
>> Oracle's efforts with Linux on sparc might really end up turning sparc64
>> into an official Debian port :). Just need to get a few package here and
>
> Please correct me if I'm wrong, but I think the Oracle Linux is only for
> virtualised guests so might have gotchas on bare metal.
you're wrong 8)
it's capable of running as baremetal. In fact that how I originally started it.
I've been driving that original baremetal box for 3 years now, so I can say that
it's reasonably robust.
There are visualization drivers fixed up/built that allow for the kernel to run
in a Solaris driven LDM environment (in fact, thats the way we usually develop
in-house since we can toss the running LDM's and recreate a new bootable
environment from scratch inside 3 minutes flat). Wim will happily flog you a
virtualization solution for a build platform though 8) -cough-
>
>> there fix like Firefox and Thunderbird which currently fail to build
>> from source.
>
> Don't know whether this is of any use but I noticed it a couple of days ago:
> https://github.com/OpenSXCE-org
>
> "FireFox-43-port-for-all-OpenSolaris-distros Runs on all distros, supports
> FlashPlugins (all versions) on fixed Illumos kernels Updated Nov 18, 2015"
>
actually it's xulrunner that is the pita. something in the xpshell is still
unaligned and causes it to fault. From my perspective, I'm being hammered to
provide a server release so the desktop space apps like firefox are low on my
priority list. Also I'm having to work with the RedHAT/Fedora src codebase so
I'm also working with older sw that needs,.. persuasion, to vaguely work.
>> Btw, have all the changes mentioned in [1] been upstreamed? I'm
>> especially very interested in the changes made to gcc to enable
>> multiarch support because we are still having issues with that
>> in Debian which is why it's disabled in the Debian gcc packages
>> for sparc64 [2], line 18.
As Wim says, that is a question more comfortably answered by Jose when the
eggnog wears off.
Mmm,.. I think I should shut up at this point before Wim smacks me around with
the toffee hammer as to the roadmap regarding L4S (linux for sparc)
Reply to: