Am 17.04.2018 um 19:15 schrieb Thorsten Glaser <t.gla...@tarent.de>: >> Yes, of course. But Andreas hit a nerve with this on me. This project >> has cost me lots of blood, tears and sweat and if someone is asking >> for it to be completely thrown out out of nothing, I'm getting a bit >> stressed out. > I completely agree here. While I’m no longer involved with the > m68k port specifically, after having spent THREE YEARS of blood, > sweat and pain to resurrect it, there are several reasons:
I’m still very thankful for your efforts! Really! > • I have come to actually like that, having been a die-hard 8088 > user in my childhood, and found the people and community very > interesting > ‣ there are fun projects like a PCI bridge, which allows using > a PCI Radeon graphics card with LCDs at 1900x12something > resolution, currently with GEM/AES only, not yet in Linux Actually there are some nice developments like http://www.apollo-accelerators.com/ to increase the speed of m68k for quite a few bugs. > • it sends a signal, and the wrong signal in my eyes, that > everything not-mainstream is not worth to be supported > ‣ specialisation is for downstreams, Debian should stay universal > ‣ read up on monoculture in agriculture and why everyone, by now, > thinks it’s a bad idea > ⇒ hint: Meltdown/Spectre… Yes, I think this is the main problem since m68k has been kicked out as a release arch. This whole second class architecture is a mistake, IMHO. Another approach would have been better, like focussing on being release-ready only for base and other essential packages, but not the whole archive. This effectively killed m68k in the long run. Other archs followed then. > • I found Debian ports very useful to gain deep insight on > how Debian and all of its components work, and can recommend > porting a new or resurrecting an old architecture to everyone > wishing to peek below the surface That’s maybe the only positive thing that evolved in the aftermaths of kicking out m68k: a parallel infrastructure was developped that could act without all those complicated formalisms of official buildds (at least in the early days). But I think this could have been achieved without kicking archs out of Debian. I think especially m68k did a great job in teaching many DDs how to deal with autobuilders and such. Buildd & co were built, because of m68k and Debian. The very first buildd was running on kullervo. > On the more technical side, while Adrian’s buildds are qemu, > I’ve continued running an ARAnyM (also emulation, but different > and thanks to Doko even FPU-complete) buildd for as long as the > system it was hosted on allowed me to do so. (That GPLhost domU > is currently unusable because of spontaneous reboots and other > problems. I might look into running one on some other system; > I have a couple of VMs on my workplace desktop but can’t use > those as they are bridged into the company LAN.) I’m still not a big fan of emulated buildds. ;-) But I have to admit that they are way faster than the old, real hardware. > We also have a number of Amiga and Atari and I believe at least > one or two Macintosh systems which, at one point or the other, > are or were in use as buildds and/or porterboxen. Well, the last info from buildd.net database: buildd=# select name, model, cpu, ram from status where arch='m68k'; name | model | cpu | ram ------------+-------------------+----------------+----- washi | Atari Falcon CT60 | 68060/66 | 256 prometheus | Aranym/distcc | 733MHz PowerPC | 256 minthe | Aranym | 8*Xeon 2G | 768 phoebe | Aranym | 8*Xeon 2G | 768 hobbes | Atari Falcon CT60 | 68060/95 | 512 merlin | Amiga 1200 | 68030/56 | 64 elgar | Amiga 4000 | 68060/50 | 128 kullervo | Amiga 3000UX | 68060/50 | 128 crest | Amiga 4000 | 68060/50 | 128 pacman | ARAnyM | VM040/240 | 512 vivaldi | Amiga 4000T | 68060/50 | 384 theia | Aranym | Dual 1.8 GHz | 750 wario | ARAnyM | VM040/180 | 768 zlin3 | Aranym | i386 | 64 spice | Amiga 3000 | 68040/40 | 320 aahz | Amiga 2000 | 68060/50 | 128 akire | Amiga 2000 | 68060/50 | 128 ara5 | ARAnyM | VM040/170 | 782 arrakis | Amiga 3000 | 68060/50 | 384 kirby | ARAnyM | VM040/214 | 512 pikachu | ARAnyM | VM040/200 | 768 (21 rows) At least crest, akire and elgar might be still online, maybe kullervo as well, but Christian can comment on this, while spice, arrakis & vivaldi are currently offline as in powered off or has a NIC that is currently not supported by Linux (spice). I’m not totally opposed in powering on one or two machines again, but it’s a matter of time and investment as well: administrating those machines is time consuming and keeping them running is expensive in terms of paying the power bill here in Germany. That’s the reason why I have powered off the machines some time ago as I didn’t feel honored of donating these resources to the Debian project anymore, because of exactly those comments like „I don’t care about your silly pet architecture! Get outta my way and don’t evenm dare to write bug reports as I will ignore them!" > I don’t know how the actual hardware can be helped to become > more usable. I also don’t know if the standard Debian porterbox > setup can be used on/for them. DSA normally does these things; > in dports we want to make things as closely to the main Debian > as possible, but as long as dports are officially unsupported, > it’s hard. (Also, you’d have to talk to Ingo, perhaps Adrian > and ragnar76 about the actual hardware.) As stated above: there *is* new powerful hardware with FPGA-based accelerators for cheap Amigas like A500/A2000, A600 and A1200. There are reports that the Vampire accel runs at a speed of a 200 MHz 68060 or even more. But currently I have no working Amiga with Debian running as a porterbox at the moment. As said, I would be willing to offer a machine if there is a general interest of having a porterbox running. > It might also be useful to create one or two buildds with > large hard discs (and possibly RAM) since some of the recent > packages (gcc-*-cross-* most prominently) make Adrian’s > systems explode… especially as his virtual buildds share > (limited) space. Fun fact: I’ve lately bought an Acard ARS2000SUP for Spice and put a 500 GB 2.5“ SATA drive into it. It was the smallest drive I could find at my default hardware dealer. That’s giving me enough space for installing Debian *and* NetBSD in parallel with hundreds of GB each! And still lots of space for AmigaOS. ;) Anyway, it’s a matter of money to have enough disk space available. The old SCSI/SCA disks are at an age where they die a slow, yet certain death. > Adrian is currently the single most-involved person driving > debian-ports forwards, on a *lot* of architectures, (not saying > there are no other porters) so I can understand his frustration. I have full respect for Adrians work. The same respect I have had for your contribution to m68k for several years! > I might even look if I can help any further. Unfortunately, as > I said above, I have no easy solution for running a buildd or > porterbox (company LAN), only for local porter builds (in clean > environments sufficiently suitable for uploadinig to the archive, > of course). Well, running a machine is one part. I might help with that. The porting stuff would then be your part. ;) As already mentioned in a different mail: there is a m68k meeting planned in September in Essen (Linuxhotel). :) -- Ciao... // http://blog.windfluechter.net Ingo \X/ XMPP: i...@jabber.windfluechter.net gpg pubkey: http://www.juergensmann.de/ij_public_key.asc
