Hi! I just created a new NETINST installer image for sparc64 after I realized our current method of creating the image [1] contained a fundamental flaw in the configuration.
To cut a long story short, we were using the wrong version of debian installer, namely the netboot version by setting DI_DIR in debian-cd's CONF.sh to the netboot directory of debian-installer (see the patch further down in [1]) instead of the cdrom directory. To quickly explain: debian-installer is contained in the initrd of the installer image and depending on whether one uses the cdrom or netboot version of debian-installer, the generated initrd contains network drivers and cdrom/pata/sata/usb storage drivers or just network drivers plus a d-i component called cdrom-retriever in the case of cdrom which is required to detect a cdrom drive and load packages from CD. Since we build the NETINST CD with netboot instead of cdrom, we were basically combining a version of debian-installer for netboot, that is pure network installation with d-i components and packages downloaded from a mirror, with a CD image which is, of course, non-sense, as this meant d-i was never using any components from the CD image (both the SATA/PATA drivers and cdrom-retriever were missing). I actually found this bug by closely comparing the installation logs of our sparc64 image and a regular amd64 testing NETINST image and it turns out, the amd64 installer was running cdrom-detect and cdrom-retriever and ours was not. The rest was a matter of grepping for cdrom-retriever and realizing our d-i version was not including the cdrom-retriever component because we were using the netboot configuration ;). In any case, I'm home now, my sparc64 machine is at work and I won't be able to test until tomorrow. So anyone else here gets the honour to test this image which should work much better now. Cheers, Adrian > [1] https://parisc.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/How_to_create_Debian_unstable_iso_images > [2] https://people.debian.org/~glaubitz/debian-cd/debian-9.0-sparc64-NETINST-1.iso -- .''`. John Paul Adrian Glaubitz : :' : Debian Developer - [email protected] `. `' Freie Universitaet Berlin - [email protected] `- GPG: 62FF 8A75 84E0 2956 9546 0006 7426 3B37 F5B5 F913
