Re: SPARC Issues Open for Conjecture
Ok, so here is my todo list as of today. I'm mostly writing this out to
help myself later, but if anyone has anything to add to these points let
me know.
1. The installer is not respecting the debian-ports gpg key, this needs
fixed or else the installer will always fail on the "Select and Install
Software" step.
One particular issue with this is that the standard debian utilities
never get installed. Any easy way to get around that is to do...
apt-get install $(tasksel --task-packages standard | tr '\n' ' ')
when you've booted into the system after installation (and setup
sources.list appropriately).
2. When choosing "Guided (Use Entire Disk)" in the partitioner, we
either need to create a ext2 boot partition by default or remove the
warning about not being able to boot from ext4. SILO will boot from ext4
for me, and others have verified this as well. Even though the SILO
utilities and documentation say otherwise.
3. When creating software RAID arrays the installer creates them as
/dev/md0, /dev/md1, etc... This propogates to silo.conf as well in the
line "root=/dev/md0". However, after installation they are recorded in
mdadm.conf as /dev/md/0, /dev/md/1, etc... While the system will still
boot, the fsck will fail as it expects to find /dev/md0 which doesn't
exist as mdadm is naming the array /dev/md/0. I'm not sure whether we
should change the behaviour of mdadm or the installer? Which is
considered right? /dev/md0 or /dev/md/0?
4. If /boot is on a software raid array, it needs to be metadata 0.90,
not 1.2. SILO cannot install on metadata 1.2 as the metadata sits where
SILO needs to be. The partitioner needs to be able to detect where /boot
is and plan accordingly. SILO also cannot directly install to a software
raid array. silo needs to install to the array's member disks directly.
/boot also has to be on RAID 1. no other RAID mode will work with SILO.
In all honestly the right thing to do here is to teach SILO about raid
arrays.
Anyways, that's all i've got for the installer as of now. If anyone has
anything to add let me know. Hopefully i have them ironed out in the
next week or so.
Reply to: