Re: Creating sparc64 installation images

[Bryce <philip.copeland@oracle.com>]

On 25/12/15 20:25, John Paul Adrian Glaubitz wrote:

On 12/25/2015 08:08 PM, John Paul Adrian Glaubitz wrote:

Any suggestions?

Alright, apparently, it has to be -m32. I also had to add "-mcpu=v8"
and set gcc to gcc-4.9 as well as add -I/usr/include/sparc64-linux-gnu
to CFLAGS and manually copy stubs-32.h into this directory.

Using gcc-4.9 and the manual copying of stubs-32.h were necessary
because gcc-multilib is currently half broken on Debian sparc64
and hence things like stubs-32.h and libgcc.a are missing for
gcc-5 on sparc64.

Complete changes are:

  * New upstream release.
  * debian/control:
    - Add sparc64 to the list of architectures.
    - Add libc6-dev-sparc, lib32gcc-4.9-dev and gcc-4.9 to B-D.
  * debian/rules:
    - Set CC to "gcc-4.9 -m32 -mcpu=v8".
  * New debian/patches/sparc64-build-fixes.patch:
    - Add -I/usr/include/sparc64-linux-gnu to CFLAGS.

Just uploaded silo for sparc64 to unreleased.

Adrian

eh wot?
I built silo as pure 64bit, but since you can't 'chainload' from 32bit silo to 64bit silo...

WAAAAAY back (and I'm not going into the politics and who to blame etc) the decision was that  we'd make a 64bit distro since, being oracle, we were manufacturing 64bit hardware an had EOL'd all the 32bit HW. It's true that originally at the very start I'd to create silo as a static 32bit binary so that it would work on the 64bit machines without needing to drag in shared 32bit libs, but Jose and I eventually kicked it into the realm of direct 64bit, and that was simply because we were asked to make a pure 64bit distro (everyone needs a 64bit 'ls' command! ha!)

So are your options here a bit twisted by the need to support 32 and 64bit at the same time? In all honestly to prevent your sanity points going negative, I would advise separating 32 and 64 into two ISO's, at least for now. There be dragons to worry about during the initial boot when you start looking at more exotic sparc HW like T5, T7 (of course you could argue what linux enthusiast would have the finances to own one of them,..*glare at wim*...). Later on when there is a bit less churn, you can revisit marrying the 32 and 64 onto the same ISO image.

You'll also hit the same issue when it comes to grub2. All our work to date has been in 64bit space so some assembly reversioning to V8 from the hand crafted code may be needed.