Hi Robin, On 17.05.21 12:36, Robin Cremer wrote:
[...] On a not entirely unrelated note: Are there any news on functioning netboot images? The last post I could find points to images from April '17 on your webspace, which were, according to the ML, not bootable because of the size. At least I can't boot them either.
Can't help you with any netboot images, though I assume the existing ones in the archives ([1], images are in `./installer-sparc64/20210415/images/netboot/netboot.tar.gz`) could actually work if they are loaded from GRUB and not from the OBP. [1]: http://ftp.ports.debian.org/debian-ports/pool-sparc64/main/d/debian-installer/
If there is no more recent version, I'll try to build something myself - are there any pointers on how to go about this? Minimal OS or the netinstaller in an .img would be preferred.
I described a possible setup to netboot with GRUB on [2]. My used version of GRUB is old (`sparc64-ieee1275-2.02+dfsg1-18`) but works. This setup works similarly to identically for most of my machinery (ia64, amd64, powerpc, ppc64, sparc64) and for me GRUB is able to load "large" images (> 100 MiB, tested during my investigation on [3]) over network w/o an issue. With a working sparc64 Debian installation it's even easier to setup. You can host everything needed (I recommend: dnsmasq (only for DNS), tftpd-hpa, isc-dhcp-server and possibly rarpd) on a Raspberry Pi for example. I assume you're already familiar with these services but just ask if you need some help in configuration. [2]: https://wiki.debian.org/Sparc64#Netbooting_with_GRUB2 [3]: https://lists.debian.org/debian-sparc/2021/03/msg00045.html
I think that would help in quick testing, as I have multiple other systems with Cheetah (UltraSPARC III, III CU and IIIi) I'd like to try provoking the panics on. Also, some older (UltraSPARC IIi and IIe+) systems are waiting for recent Debian :-)
For testing multiple systems for anomalies I'd recommend to netboot with a Debian root FS provided by NFS which saves you the time to install Debian on every machine. There were two posts on the debian-sparc list recently ([4]) by Anatoly that mentioned the `stress-ng` tool, which might be helpful in provoking panics and possibly identifying the source of a panic. [4]: https://lists.debian.org/cgi-bin/search?P=stress-ng&DEFAULTOP=or&B=Gdebian-sparc&SORT=&HITSPERPAGE=10 Cheers, Frank
