Hi,
On 3/4/19 1:46 PM, David Henderson wrote:
On Mon, 4 Mar 2019, John Paul Adrian Glaubitz wrote:
I'm afraid your machine has not enough memory to run Linux. I don't think
you won't get far with just 14 MiB of memory and I wouldn't be surprised
if that's the reason the kernel won't boot for you.
Have Debian kernels really grown that much?
Many years ago I tried Debian stable in Aranym with just 14MB of memory.
Kernel itself wasn't the problem, but Debian user-space was. After
logging in, there was only 1-2MB free RAM. Replacing Bash with
something leaner, removing *everything* from boot that's not absolutely
needed (logging etc), and building more minimal kernel config could
help.
Ah, thanks for this. That's a shame. So Debian has evolved beyond the
ability to run on any stock Atari hardware bar the TT? The Falcon is
physically unable to address more than 14Mb without getting out the
soldering iron and replacing the CPU and bus.
Another serious problem was crypto. Before changing PAM to use MD5
instead of SHA, login was unusable slow (modern crypto needs special
crypto instructions to run at reasonable speed).
=> I would suggest preparing suitable stripped down / configured Debian
installation in emulator before trying it on real (16Mhz/14MB) HW.
Latest Hatari 2.2.x version in Debian "should" have good enough
TT & Falcon / 030 / MMU emulation to run Linux, and it supports
TT-RAM also with Falcon:
hatari --tos tos404.img --machine falcon -s 14 --ttram 32 --addr24 off
--ide-master <IDE image> <linux boot floppy image>
(Instead of Atari TOS, one could also use the latest free / open source
EmuTOS 512k release image.)
I would suggest doing at least the final preparation in Hatari instead
of Aranym, because Aranym doesn't emulate all Falcon HW, and it's
emulating (AFAIK somewhat simpler) 040 CPU instead of 030.
Aranym is much faster (because it doesn't try to be cycle accurate etc),
and it emulates networking which makes some things easier though, so
one could start with that though.
Doing some more digging I see Michael Schmitz mentioned the same in
passing last year
(https://lists.debian.org/debian-68k/2018/09/msg00003.html), but the
positive there is it sounds like the kernel itself (from 2018) ought to
be able to boot, but I may need a sysvinit release. Would that be
Pre-Jessie?
Also it sounds like Geert was able to build a working 3.16 kernel in
2015 (https://lists.debian.org/debian-68k/2016/06/msg00059.html), so
that may be an option.
If somebody can provide links to suitable images for latest debian m68k
images & kernels and short instructions how to boot them, I could
debug things a bit with Hatari.
Or if somebody else wants to try that himself, I can help with any
Hatari related issues (I'm one of its developers).
- Eero
