Re: Kernel Panics / Re: GRUB testers on SPARC needed
Hi Robin,
On 17.05.21 12:36, Robin Cremer wrote:
[...]
On a not entirely unrelated note:
Are there any news on functioning netboot images? The last post I could
find points to images from April '17 on your webspace, which were,
according to the ML, not bootable because of the size.
At least I can't boot them either.
Can't help you with any netboot images, though I assume the existing
ones in the archives ([1], images are in
`./installer-sparc64/20210415/images/netboot/netboot.tar.gz`) could
actually work if they are loaded from GRUB and not from the OBP.
[1]:
http://ftp.ports.debian.org/debian-ports/pool-sparc64/main/d/debian-installer/
If there is no more recent version, I'll try to build something myself -
are there any pointers on how to go about this? Minimal OS or the
netinstaller in an .img would be preferred.
I described a possible setup to netboot with GRUB on [2]. My used
version of GRUB is old (`sparc64-ieee1275-2.02+dfsg1-18`) but works.
This setup works similarly to identically for most of my machinery
(ia64, amd64, powerpc, ppc64, sparc64) and for me GRUB is able to load
"large" images (> 100 MiB, tested during my investigation on [3]) over
network w/o an issue. With a working sparc64 Debian installation it's
even easier to setup. You can host everything needed (I recommend:
dnsmasq (only for DNS), tftpd-hpa, isc-dhcp-server and possibly rarpd)
on a Raspberry Pi for example. I assume you're already familiar with
these services but just ask if you need some help in configuration.
[2]: https://wiki.debian.org/Sparc64#Netbooting_with_GRUB2
[3]: https://lists.debian.org/debian-sparc/2021/03/msg00045.html
I think that would help in quick testing, as I have multiple other
systems with Cheetah (UltraSPARC III, III CU and IIIi) I'd like to try
provoking the panics on.
Also, some older (UltraSPARC IIi and IIe+) systems are waiting for
recent Debian :-)
For testing multiple systems for anomalies I'd recommend to netboot with
a Debian root FS provided by NFS which saves you the time to install
Debian on every machine. There were two posts on the debian-sparc list
recently ([4]) by Anatoly that mentioned the `stress-ng` tool, which
might be helpful in provoking panics and possibly identifying the source
of a panic.
[4]:
https://lists.debian.org/cgi-bin/search?P=stress-ng&DEFAULTOP=or&B=Gdebian-sparc&SORT=&HITSPERPAGE=10
Cheers,
Frank
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