On Saturday 30 June 2007 13:15:44 Blue Swirl wrote: > On 6/30/07, Thiemo Seufer <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > Johannes Schindelin wrote: > > > Hi, > > > > > > On Sat, 30 Jun 2007, Blue Swirl wrote: > > > > On 6/30/07, Christian MICHON <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > > > DetaolB aimed to be a "much-less-than-a-floppy" x86 linux live > > > > > distro. Now, it's evolving more into "a-la-slax" type of distro. > > > > > > > > As the number of Sparc32 distributions keeps approaching zero, could > > > > you consider porting DetaolB to non-x86 CPUs? > > > > > > Yes, please! > > > > The reason why distributions drop sparc32 is the unmaintained kernel. > > Nobody stepped up for Linux kernel maintenance in the last years. > > Debian managed to keep up a sort-of working kernel for the last > > release, the people who put their time into it are disinclined to > > repeat this exercise. > > But there is a difference in maintaining a kernel suitable for high > quality distribution with over 18733 packages working in different > real hardware, versus a test/evaluation distribution with <30 packages > running on Qemu. I'd see that as an "enhanced qemu-tests.tar.gz".
Just FYI, Firmware Linux builds for sparc and has for months now. http://landley.net/code/firmware Go "./build.sh sparc", and wait a bit. It even generates a run-sparc.sh in the build directory that'll invoke qemu against the kernel and ext2 image it generated. That creates a sparc cross compiler, uses it to build a root filesystem containing a native toolchain for sparc, and packages it into an ext2 image. Over on arm I've built binutils and gcc natively inside the emulator. The sparc platform has a problem that if I boot with init as a "hello world" program everything behaves as expected (there are two in the image for testing purposes, /tools/bin/hello-dynamic and /tools/bin/hello-static). But if you boot with init=/tools/bin/bash it hangs. And so do the busybox shells. I think it's a uClibc bug on sparc, but haven't made time to track it down. Either that or the kernel needs something _weird_ for console initialization. (The cross-compiler and kernel seem to be working fine...) You can try it out yourself by downloading all the *sparc* files from http://landley.net/code/firmware/downloads/images and then running: qemu-system-sparc -nographic -no-reboot -hda image-sparc.ext2 -kernel \ zImage-sparc -append 'rw init=/tools/bin/hello-dynamic panic=1 \ PATH=/tools/bin root=/dev/sda console=ttyS0' That prints "Hello world!", panics, and exits. ./run-sparc.sh does the exact same command line with "init=/tools/bin/sh" (bash 2.05b), which hangs. Note that init=/tools/bin/ash (busybox ash) does the same thing. Haven't debugged beyond that yet... Rob P.S. I gave a tutorial about this system at OLS, and my lecture notes are at http://landley.net/ols/ols2007/tutorial.txt -- "One of my most productive days was throwing away 1000 lines of code." - Ken Thompson.