Re: Trying out debian sparc64

[John Paul Adrian Glaubitz <glaubitz@physik.fu-berlin.de>]

On Fri, Jul 14, 2017 at 02:11:33PM +0300, Meelis Roos wrote:
> > I agree that this is a problem, there is actually a technical reason
> > for that which is the fact that the bootloader (or was it the
> > firmware?) is choking on the size of the installer image.
> > 
> > I did create some images for testing:
> > 
> > > https://people.debian.org/~glaubitz/netboot/
> 
> Will try, thanks!

There was discussion on the netboot images somewhere on the
debian-sparc mailing list, forgot where.

> > > * Installer still tells ext4 is unsupported for silo, that should not be 
> > >   a problem for years now?
> 
> Actually, I may have hit a problem with silo - silos is not fining any 
> files, no /etc/silo.conf, no /boon/vmlinuz or any other file.

Yeah, I usually create a separate /boot partition with 1 GiB to avoid
issues with SILO.

> Comparing filesystem features - the news fs has 64bit and metadata_csum 
> features that my working ext4 filesystems do not have. Will make more 
> test to see if these are related.
> 
> > SILO is being phased out and replaced with GRUB anyway. The reason why
> > we're still defaulting to SILO and not GRUB is because not all patches
> > by Eric Snowberg have been merged upstream yet and are hence part of
> > the package.
> > 
> > See: https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug…4568
> 
> Should it work on any sparc64?

Currently all sun4v systems are officially supported. sun4u may work
as well, but are not officially supported. I think there were plans to
work on sun4u support in the future.

See: https://github.com/esnowberg/grub2-sparc/wiki

Here are grub2 Debian packages with Eric's sparc64 patches integrated:

> http://snapshot.debian.org/package/grub2/2.02%7Ebeta3-5%2Bsparc64/

Several users have reported success.

> > > So it seems the installer does not have relevant PGP key for this repo.
> > > 
> > > Am I using wrong repo? Should I add some PGP key manually? Or is the 
> > > March installer out of date with respect to current PGP keys after 
> > > stretch was released?
> > 
> > This was an issue in debian-cd and has been fixed:
> > 
> > > https://.debian.org/plugins/scmgit/cgi-bin/gitweb.cgi?pÞbian-cd/debian-cd.git;a=commit;h¶c7df147ab61ae42d97610b78e8480cb8b81e00
> 
> No actual hostname int he URL?

Oops. No idea how I managed to do that. Here's the full URL:

> https://alioth.debian.org/plugins/scmgit/cgi-bin/gitweb.cgi?pÞbian-cd/debian-cd.git;a=summary

Adrian

-- 
 .''`.  John Paul Adrian Glaubitz
: :' :  Debian Developer - glaubitz@debian.org
`. `'   Freie Universitaet Berlin - glaubitz@physik.fu-berlin.de
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