Hi! Since GRUB2 is now improving on SPARC support, we should start looking into the changes necessary to use GRUB2 instead of SILO for new installations.
Newer SPARC machines starting from the T4 support GPT partition tables. In debian-installer, partman-partitioning detects the architecture and subarch type to determine which types of partition tables are supported [1]. This script calls archdetect from the src:hw-detect package [2] which uses functions from libdebian-installer to determine the architecture and subarch. On x86, the presence of EFI support is used to determine whether GPT is to be used [3]. And the availability of EFI itself is detected by checking whether the EFI filesystem (efivarfs) is present [4]. For sparc and sparc64, there is currently no subarch detectection at all [5] and thus, the disk-label.sh script [1] hard-wires sparc and sparc64 to Sun partition tables. So, the question now is what the best approach would be to let debian-installer use GPT on sparc64 machines where it's supported. The simplest solution would certainly be to just run "prtconf -pv | grep -c gpt" from busybox in the disk-label.sh script and then enable GPT conditionally. But this isn't necessarily the cleanest solution. Any suggestions? Adrian > [1] > https://anonscm.debian.org/cgit/d-i/partman-partitioning.git/tree/lib/disk-label.sh > [2] https://packages.qa.debian.org/h/hw-detect.html > [3] > https://anonscm.debian.org/cgit/d-i/libdebian-installer.git/tree/src/system/subarch-x86-linux.c#n273 > [4] > https://anonscm.debian.org/cgit/d-i/libdebian-installer.git/tree/src/system/efi.c > [5] > https://anonscm.debian.org/cgit/d-i/libdebian-installer.git/tree/src/system/subarch-sparc-linux.c -- .''`. John Paul Adrian Glaubitz : :' : Debian Developer - [email protected] `. `' Freie Universitaet Berlin - [email protected] `- GPG: 62FF 8A75 84E0 2956 9546 0006 7426 3B37 F5B5 F913
