Re: Status of Debian in Sparcs/Ultra Sparcs

[Steve Dunham <dunham@cse.msu.edu>]

Wichert Akkerman <wakkerma@cs.leidenuniv.nl> writes:

> Previously Ward Deng wrote:
> > There is possibility of merging both 32-bit and 64-bit
> > distribution together.

> Has anyone tried installing an ultrasparc using the sparc installation
> disks? Someone was wondering why we where basing our work on ultrapenguin
> instead of the Debian sparc port, which made me wonder if we could actually
> use their installation procedure.

I just sent instructions on how to install sparc32 Debian on an Ultra5
to the debian-sparc list.  I think the the official sparc32 Debian
could easily be adapted to run on both Ultra and non-ultra machines.
The big missing pieces are:

 * We need the modutils from UltraPenguin, which work on both systems.
 * We need to use tilo for our tftpimage (it autoselects kernels).
 * We need a means to build sparc64 kernels.  (Ultrapenguin provides a
   crosscompiler.)

Silo already knows how to load the correct kernel, and the
UltraPenguin modutils also work on both architectures.


I appreciate the Debian UltraLinux goal of a complete 64-bit userland,
but IMHO there is something to be gained by having a working 32-bit
Ultra distribution in the interim.


Steve
dunham@cse.msu.edu