Re: M4000 failing to boot Debian Sparc64

[Vocalía Infraestructura TIC CEEINA <tic@ceeina.unizar.es>]

Hi Frank,

Thank you for your fast answer. I also thought when installing that it was an incompatibility problem with the processor architecture, as you stated.

However, having a look at the wiki (https://wiki.debian.org/Sparc64) it seems to me that machines with a sun4u SPARC VII+ processor should be able to run it, right? Our M4000 has a VII+ processor.

Maybe I have not fully understood the wiki or your message, therefore sorry if I'm wrong.

Best regards.

El dom, 2 jul 2023 a las 15:43, Frank Scheiner (<frank.scheiner@web.de>) escribió:

Hi,

On 02.07.23 12:35, Vocalía Infraestructura TIC CEEINA wrote:
> Hi,
>
> We are trying to boot Debian Sparc64 on a SPARC Enterprise M4000 server
> (SPARC64 VII+), but, after selecting normal / expert / secure install
> mode, we get this error message and the installer quits:
>
>     /ERROR: Last Trap: Division by Zero/
>     /%TL:1 %TT:28 %TPC:43056c %TnPC:430570 %TSTATE:1180001603/
>     /%PSTATE:16 ( IE:1 PRIV:1 PEF:1 )/
>
>
> We have tried with the following ISO images:
> /debian-12.0.0-sparc64-NETINST-1.iso/,
> /debian-10.0-sparc64-NETINST-1.iso/ and /debian-9.0-sparc64-NETINST-1.iso/.
>
> Maybe this is an unknown incompatibility, or we are missing some steps
> when installing.

No, it just does not work on those machines. E.g. the only thing that
works on e.g. SPARC64 V (tested on a PRIMEPOWER 250) is GRUB2.

AFAIK the Linux kernel only works (fully) on Sun's (Ultra)SPARC (I, II,
IIi/e, III, IIIi, IV and T)s and Fujitsu's SPARC64 X.

> ¿Any ideas on how to fix this? ¿Has anyone experienced something similar?

It would require some development effort. OpenBSD has support for those
machines, though, if that could be an alternative for you.

Cheers,
Frank