Re: Please validate test kernel on UltraSPARC machines
Hi Gregor,
On Mon, 2025-10-13 at 13:39 +0200, Gregor Riepl wrote:
> Some good news for once:
>
> I finally had some time to reinstall my Ultra 10 using the install iso that you
> provided a few years ago. Not everything went smooth, but I didn't encounter any
> major issues, and I'm (gently) stress-testing the machine now.
Which one?
> What went well:
> - The installer booted without issue
> - The installation was generally smooth with only a few hiccups
> - The machine booted the new system on the first attempt, and multiple times after
> - The kernel is up to date: 6.16.11+deb14-sparc64
> - I haven't seen any of the kernel panics and oopses that plague my Fire V215. These
> must be specific problems of the smp kernel (and SMP SPARCs). The Ultra 10 is single-core.
The next stable kernel updates for 6.16.x will contain a lof of SPARC-specific fixes
which should make the kernel on all models substantially more stable.
> What didn't:
> - The HDD is making bad seeking noises while Linux is booting, but no messages in the
> kernel log, and SMART tests show no errors. It's also very quiet during normal operation.
> Might need to find a replacement IDE drive still.
> - The installer had an outdated debian-ports-archive-keyring and refused to process data from
> the ports archive until I manually downloaded and installed the current version before proceeding
> with the installation.
Which is perfectly normal when using old installation images.
> - After first boot, I couldn't install any packages because start-stop-daemon was missing (see below)
>
> This is what I got from dpkg:
>
> Fetched 44.6 kB in 1s (82.9 kB/s)
> Reading changelogs... Done
> dpkg: warning: 'start-stop-daemon' not found in PATH or not executable
> dpkg: error: 1 expected program not found in PATH or not executable
> Note: root's PATH should usually contain /usr/local/sbin, /usr/sbin and /sbin
> Error: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (2)
>
> /usr/sbin/start-stop-daemon was indeed missing, despite the current version of dpkg being installed.
> After creating a dummy shell script and reinstalling dpkg, everything was fine again.
Yes, that is also a problem that is not present in current images.
> I haven't tested Xorg yet, but I suspect it will work ok with the built-in Rage 128.
> I'll test the Creator (sunffb) at a later point, when I'm happy with stability. IIRC there was some recent
> effort to fix the driver and make it usable again. My ancient effort[1] made the driver compile and load,
> but the UI was frozen at the login screen.
OK.
FWIW, I will build new installation images once the SPARC kernel fixes have found their official
way into Debian which should be in a few days when Linux 6.16.13 is released.
Adrian
--
.''`. John Paul Adrian Glaubitz
: :' : Debian Developer
`. `' Physicist
`- GPG: 62FF 8A75 84E0 2956 9546 0006 7426 3B37 F5B5 F913
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