Re: Kernel Panics / Re: GRUB testers on SPARC needed

2021-05-25 Thread Robin Cremer
thanks for the information. I'm still battling a few issues, but the 
most prominent problem on my way to netboot-install is that I can't seem 
to get the apt/sources.list right for fetching sources (?):

You just have to build the debian-installer package on sparc64 using sbuild and 
as a result, you will get
the tarball containing the netboot and cdrom images.
...trying to get the build-deps for debian-installer complains, that I 
should at least specify one deb-src line in my sources.list...
I have the settings the installer configured ("deb-src 
http://deb.debian.org/debian-ports/ sid main"), but sid doesn't have a 
/main/source on debian-ports... "unreleased" does have a source folder,
but apt seems to ignore the "unreleased" distribution for sources (maybe 
that's what the comment "unreleased does not support sources yet" means?)


Well... long story short: Can you point me in the right direction to get 
the sources the debian-ports use? Or is the normal way to pull sources 
from "normal" debian repositories?


Thanks,
Robin



Re: Kernel Panics / Re: GRUB testers on SPARC needed

2021-05-17 Thread Frank Scheiner

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



Re: Kernel Panics / Re: GRUB testers on SPARC needed

2021-05-17 Thread John Paul Adrian Glaubitz
On 5/17/21 12:36 PM, Robin Cremer wrote:
>>> https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/commit/arch/sparc?id=e5e8b80d352ec999d2bba3ea584f541c83f4ca3f
> I'm using the latest version from the repositories:
>> 5.10.0-6-sparc64-smp #1 SMP Debian 5.10.28-1 (2021-04-09) sparc64 GNU/Linux
> The commit you mention seems to be in 5.12 and 5.13-rc2?
> Is there a pre-built SMP-image for this or do I have to set up building 
> myself?

The commit has been backported to the 5.10.x series which is an LTS kernel:

> https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux.git/commit/arch/sparc?h=linux-5.10.y&id=f2b38f03a3f71c30c77a4516b26c8bea13cc08ce

> Running on the v215 was a real nightmare yesterday. They will be stable for 
> hours, but
> certain actions (in one occurence executing dmesg (!), apt-get installing 
> nfs-common,
> some mounts systemd tries) crashed both of the boxes with various errors, 
> most of them the
> dreaded line with "p

Try to use a 4.19 kernel from snapshot.debian.org, these are known to run more 
stable on the
older machines. Any machine older than T2 seem to have some issues with the 
more recent kernels.

If you have the possibility to bisect the issue, that would be great. I do have 
such older machines
myself but currently no possibility to set them up for bisecting.

On the newer CPUs (>= SPARC T2), the kernel runs stable. Dave Miller (the Linux 
SPARC maintainer)
uses a T5 himself for testing.

> Retrying the dpkg-reconfigure as well. After the systemd-unit for - I think - 
> rpcbind was activated
> during package configuration, both boxes crashed about 4-6 times, I had to 
> reset from OBP.
> After a few tries, installation went through, then. Now I can mount nfs...
> The hours I spent in the rescue mode of the current installation CD without 
> any trouble made me suspect
> that non-SMP-kernels are "more stable". I'm currently running the SMP variant 
> with "maxcpus=1", that
> seems stable so far... But as with any other sporadic issue, that's hard to 
> tell with a way to reliably
> trigger the errors...

I think these issues have started to show up sometime after 4.19 but only on 
the older machines. So, chances
are you can bisect the issue.

> 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.

I don't have the time and resources at the moment to work on netboot. I'm not 
just maintaining the sparc64
port in Debian but also many of the other unofficial ports such as 32-bit 
PowerPC. So far, netboot has not
been a top priority so I haven't worked on it yet.

Additional support is always welcome.

> At least I can't boot them either.
> 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.

You just have to build the debian-installer package on sparc64 using sbuild and 
as a result, you will get
the tarball containing the netboot and cdrom images.

> 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 these machines, I would recommend installing a regular release, then 
downgrading the kernel to 4.19, then
bi-sect using a cross-compiled kernel if you have a working reproducer.

Adrian

-- 
 .''`.  John Paul Adrian Glaubitz
: :' :  Debian Developer - glaub...@debian.org
`. `'   Freie Universitaet Berlin - glaub...@physik.fu-berlin.de
  `-GPG: 62FF 8A75 84E0 2956 9546  0006 7426 3B37 F5B5 F913