You can, but I just recommend building an upstream kernel from source using the standard Debian configuration and cross-building it from a fast x86_64 machine instead of waiting several days until the kernel was built on your slow SPARC machine.
I did it anyway - don't have a lot of time to work on the machine, and it's good to have the olde box cooking again. Learned a few things about the build process of the Debian kernel on the way, and even found out how to do incremental builds with patches.
To build the kernel on an x86_64 machine, just fetch the latest kernel toolchain for sparc64 here: ...
Thanks for the instructions anyway, I may use them in the future for faster testing. The Fire V215's waiting for a stable SMP kernel... So, I can now confirm that the patch works. With the minimum disk size set to one memory page, accessing /dev/fd0 no longer fails. I still think this is not the proper solution, but it should be fine for practical purposes. As long as the default page size doesn't exceed the minimum size one can expect from a floppy disk, it won't cause any issues. If an IBM 23FD 8" floppy (81.664K capacity, according to Wikipedia) can be considered the baseline, are there any architectures where the default page size is larger than 80K? Anyway, I commented on the GitHub issue [1], and you have my blessing to include a Tested-by: Gregor Riepl <[email protected]> if you submit the patch upstream. Thanks for the fix! [1] https://github.com/sparclinux/issues/issues/18
