On 05/14/2018 08:37 PM, Dennis Clarke wrote:
Looking at https://wiki.debian.org/Sparc64#Network_booting it says : "If you already have a working installation of Debian GNU/Linux Sid for sparc64" nope. So this is chicken and egg here.
But I also later ([1]) wrote that you can create the required directory structure on an arbitrary amd64 system. And most likely this will also work on any non-sparc64 system that runs Debian GNU/Linux Sid because of Multiarch support.
[1]: https://wiki.debian.org/Sparc64#Preparing_GRUB2_files_for_TFTP_service
I think what I need to do is just get a cdrom ( not a dvd ) and attach it to an IDE bus on the netra motherboard and then hope that there exists an iso which will work.
No need for that, see above. You should be able to netboot with the kernel and initramfs from a recent Debian netinstall ISO, e.g. [2]. Those files are located in `/boot` as `sparc64` and `initrd.gz` respectively.
[2]: https://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/ports/debian-10.0-sparc64-NETINST-1.iso
However this means ripping the netra out
of the rack and playing around with hardware. None of this is reasonable with an M4000 that I have standing by as that thing is a monster to lift.
Although GRUB2 will start on a system using SPARC64 CPUs from Fujitsu - I tested this with a PRIMEPOWER 250 with SPARC64 V+ CPUs - the Linux kernel doesn't yet support these CPUs apart from the SPARC64 X AFAIK (see last paragraph in [3] and [4]).
[3]: https://wiki.debian.org/Sparc64#Installing_the_Debian_SPARC64_Port [4]: https://oss.oracle.com/projects/linux-sparc/ Cheers, Frank
