On Mon, 18 Apr 2005, Jan-Benedict Glaw wrote:
On Mon, 2005-04-18 02:08:36 +0200, Peter 'p2' De Schrijver <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in message <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:We are looking to get some sparc machines sponsored for the debcamp for various development tasks. In order to have an idea which architectures people want to work on, we look for some projects or things people would be working on involving sparc. If you have a request for a certain subarch or have some idea involving sparc, please mail me. I will coordinate with Andreas as to what we can actually get hold of.
I haven't switched on my sparc32 machines for quite some time, but I remember there were some TODOs:
- Redo SILOs memory management to be able to load larger kernel binaries
I do not know the status of that, but SILO definitely has its share of problems other than inability to load large kernels. It fails to boot the kernel on same machines, a representative bug is 261824 (boot failure on SunFire 280R). Andres Salomon ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) has made some debugging on it recently (see the bug trail), but no solution was proposed so far.
- Check if current testing/unstable works w/o h/w mul/div
You probably have in mind the restoration of the sun4c support. Currently glibc and some other libraries are built with v8 optimization, which uses
hardware mul/div, not available on sun4c. If you will manage to get a sun4c machine for debcamp (such as Sparc IPX), someone can give a shot at building the essential libraries without this optimization and trying to boot it. I have built glibc and even a netboot image for it, but so far nobody managed to netboot a sun4c machine using it. More information:
http://lists.debian.org/debian-sparc/2005/01/msg00152.html http://www.wooyd.org/debian/sun4c/
- Get 2.6.x to run SMP
Ugh, AFAIK this is a tough one. Whoever is going to fiddle with that, might be interested in looking at this thread, where at least partial success was reported:
http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?t=110828128000001&r=1&w=2
Other important sparc topics:
* Kernel bug resulting in "Remapping the kernel... FP Disabled", message, followed by returning to the PROM prompt. It seems like it can happen on variety of Ultra machines, most often - when booting the 2.4.x kernel from CD-ROM. If someone manages to reproduce it during debcamp, _any_ debugging information on it is welcome.
* Failure of the current 2.6 netboot images to boot on sparc32. It can be a kernel bug or a SILO bug, or some combination thereof. During the boot the initrd image cannot be mounted and boot fails. Should be reproducible with any sparc32 hardware.
Best regards,
Jurij Smakov [EMAIL PROTECTED] Key: http://www.wooyd.org/pgpkey/ KeyID: C99E03CC
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