On 2016-06-09 22:15, alexmcwhirter@triadic.us wrote:
On 2016-06-09 21:55, alexmcwhirter@triadic.us wrote:On 2016-06-09 18:41, alexmcwhirter@triadic.us wrote:Here are some areas i intend to work on, any info / comments on the implementation of these would be appreciated.A. ZFS Modules should not be loaded by the installer unless explicitlychosen by the user. ZFS works on most sparc64 boxes, but not all of them. Especially the older sbus machines and a few of the large enterprise boxes that dofunky things with memory allocation. If we always load ZFS modules theinstaller will panic on these machines even if the end user has no intention of using ZFS. I propose two options.1. Only load zfs modules if the user is creating a ZFS pool at install time.2. Create a prompt asking the user if they wish to enable ZFS support before partitioning. B. Select / Install software fails every time on multiple machines. (tested on T5120, T1000, V210, M4000) Not sure what happening here, but ill look into it and try to patch out the issue. Not critical as you can skip this section and move on to installing silo. C. The partitioner should always create an ext2 boot partition. Installing with "Guided - use whole disk" will create a single ext4 partition which silo cannot boot from. The partitioner does warn against this, but having the partitioner take care of this by itself makes more sense. The question is, what size do we make /boot by default? 128M / 512M? D. The kernel is missing drivers for a lot of older sparc gear. Sparc ESP, PTI Qlogic, etc... Ill make a list of the ones i can verify and make a patch.Adding a note to point D, the modules are there but not loaded. Doing a "modprobe sunesp" then running the installer will find the cdrom. Where do we determine what modules to load at boot?Another addition, qlogicptci is missing it's firmware. Namely isp1000.bin which is needed on pretty much every sparc machine that uses this driver. It's free firmware so it should be easy enough to add too the linux-firmware-free package.
I case anyone sees this and is having issues installing debian on any of the older sbus based sun boxes (early ultra series, E3K, E4K, E5K, E6K, E10K, and probably a few more), this is how to get it working as of today.
after the installer fails to detect the cdrom drive, drop to a shell and do "modprobe sun_esp". If you're hard disk / disks are on esp controllers then your good to go. If they're on qlogic controllers you will need a copy of isp1000.bin. I pulled mine from /lib/firmware/qlogic/isp1000.bin on Gentoo. You will only find this firmware on Gentoo if you build the kernel with the Qlogic PTI driver enabled.
You'll want to copy isp1000.bin to a cd and mount it in the debian initramfs rescue shell (/media is a good place). Then you will want to copy that file from the cd mount point to /lib/firmware/qlogic/isp1000.bin in the debian initramfs root. You will have to mkdir the directories.
You can then exit the shell back into the installer and continue from there. The installer will fail to find the network driver, this is usually the Sun HME driver on these older boxes. Just pick the right driver from the list. It will then fail to find the disk driver, the right driver for these boxes should be either sun_esp or qlogicpti.
After the installer finishes don't reboot! go back into the shell and chroot into the new installation. You will want to add your disk controller drivers to /etc/initramfs-tools/modules (sun_esp or qlogicpti, or both in my case). Afterwards do a "update-initramfs -u -k <kernel version>" (you can find you're kernel version under /lib/modules) and then exit back into the installer. Finally, you can finish the installation and reboot into a hopefully working install.
As for why you have to load all of these modules by hand? as of now im not sure but either the installer or systemd/udev isn't detecting sbus devices automagically.