Hi! I have now disabled SILO support in debian-installer meaning that it's no longer possible to install the SILO bootloader when installing Debian on sparc64.
All I did was to exclude the package "silo-installer" from the debian-cd build image process. Thus, if it should be necessary to restore SILO support, it's a matter of changing a single line back in debian-cd. The main reason for this step is that SILO is hardly maintained upstream anymore and also doesn't have support for 64-bit systems, although it will usually run fine on most 64-bit systems. But it also lacks many features GRUB has, including support for modern filesystems and GPT. GRUB is fully supported on sparc64 and, from the various feedback we got on the mailing list, should be compatible with even the oldest UltraSPARC machines. So it will work on any machine that run Debian's sparc64 port. The installer components "grub-installer" and "partman-auto" have been modified to support installation on both older machines which support Sun disk labels only as well as newer machines which also support GPT labels (T4 or newer). It currently does not support any 32-bit SPARC machines, i.e. anything before UltraSPARC (sun4u). But since Debian hasn't had any support for those machines since Debian Lenny [1], I don't think this poses a problem at the moment. * As always, please report any issues you may have to the mailing list. Thanks to everyone involved to getting GRUB working on sparc64! Adrian * Although we are potentially able to bring back sparc32 support in the future as kernel support has allegedly improved for these machines but this is a different topic. > [1] https://wiki.debian.org/Sparc32 -- .''`. John Paul Adrian Glaubitz : :' : Debian Developer - [email protected] `. `' Freie Universitaet Berlin - [email protected] `- GPG: 62FF 8A75 84E0 2956 9546 0006 7426 3B37 F5B5 F913
