Re: SPARC Issues Open for Conjecture
On 2016-06-10 04:50, John Paul Adrian Glaubitz wrote:
On 06/10/2016 03:55 AM, alexmcwhirter@triadic.us wrote:
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?
You don't. The module should normally load automatically using udev
events.
If it doesn't, the driver in question needs to be patched to get this
ability:
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=815977
The relevant commits are:
http://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/davem/sparc.git/commit/?id=5bde2c9be701c4583f0a9243bd46590ec401bfba
http://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/davem/sparc.git/commit/?id=36128d204b81c099b5779771127a5546eac549c9
I can look into the sunesp driver and patch it, if necessary, too.
Something that might be worth doing it having the install check loaded
modules on initialization, then compare that to the loaded modules
before finalizing. If any new modules have shown up they should be added
to /etc/initramfs-tools/modules before generating initrd. This way any
modules the user had to manually load during install time will at least
carry over to the actual installation.
Of course udev is the better option, but think of this as a type of fail
safe in case udev doesn't work.
As for building installation images, I have already mitigated many
issues in
the process, but there is still some work to do. If you want to give
building
these images yourself a try, you can try to follow the guide by Helge
Deller
which he created for hppa:
https://parisc.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/How_to_create_Debian_unstable_iso_images
Some notes on the guide:
* The linked patch for the CONF.sh script contains one error:
https://parisc.wiki.kernel.org/images-parisc/2/2e/Debian-cd.patch.txt
DI_DIR should end with "build/tmp/cdrom", not "build/tmp/netboot" as
otherwise
your CD images will be built with the netboot version of Debian
Installer
when you actually need the CD-ROM version of DI.
* You don't need to compile "silo", "silo-installer" and "sparc-utils"
yourself, but
you *might* have to add them to the list of local packages in
reprepro.
* If reprepro fails to sync, just try another sync later. If it fails
syncing with
the same package over and over again, you can just add the package in
question
to the ignore list of reprepro.
* Checkout my reprepro configuration for sparc64, it might be useful
for you:
https://people.debian.org/~glaubitz/reprepro-conf-sparc64.tgz
Great, i've been looking for information about this. Are there any
guides out there for cloning the entire source tree and building a repo
from scratch? I have seen some references to buildd which appears to be
an internal tool to do just this more or less, but with not a lot of
documentation that i can find.
I cannot make any comments on the ZFS issues you were discussing, but
it's great
to hear that someone is taking care of it.
ZFS actually works great on most sparc boxes, but i don't know where
debian stands on it with the CDDL debate. That's an issue for another
time i suppose. Regardless the installer in fact doesn't have the ZFS
modules included (probably because they fail to build on SPARC without
some minor patching). The partitioner attempts to load them, but they
are missing so it just keep chugging along without them, which is fine
for now.
Oh, and if you end up having to patch debian-installer or debian-cd,
let me know.
At least for debian-cd, I can commit any patches myself, I have commit
access. For
debian-installer, you will have to propose patches to their mailing
list (I think
the list is debian-boot@l.d.o).
Will do, i have a feeling that we should avoid patching the installer
and just make sure the CD has everything in place to work with it if
possible.
Anyway, thank you very much for your efforts and help! This is highly
appreciated :).
Adrian
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