[CentOS] Centos for SPARC- when?

[Pasi Pirhonen]

Hi,


On Tue, Oct 04, 2005 at 12:14:13PM -0500, Aleksandar Milivojevic wrote:
> Quoting Pasi Pirhonen <upi at iki.fi>:
> 
> Speaking of Aurora, last time I was playing with it, RAID on boot was not
> supported.  So you couldn't have /boot on RAID1, and also attempting to do 
> so
> would trash either partition table or file system superblock (!?), depending
> which order you attempt to do things.  I don't know if it was problem with
> Aurora or with kernel.  Have you attempted doing anything like that in your
> testing?


I don't know about that. I know that for ia64 the RHEL2.1 dfid let to
mirror this VFAT /boot/efi, but RHEL3 didn't. I do believe that
RHEL3-level stuff lets to mirror /boot on x86-64, but RHEL4 doesn't.
The point being that this is working quite varying way even on
mode mainstream stuff.

At least i can say that this is not first priority problem at all. As
long as there isn't reasonably well installable version at all, the
secondary problems aren't on the list :)


> 
> 
> Definitely.  If it takes more than 5 minuts of work to get sparc32 kernel
> working, it is not worth it.  And even than it would be waste of disc space 
> on
> mirrors to store sparc32 distribution.  Its like having i386 (as in 
> boots on an
> Intel 80386 or 80386SX processor) distribution.  Simply way too slow.

I'd say that sparc32 would be there eventually, but not for initial
release. 

> 
> Is entire userland going to be 32-bit only, or there will be option to 
> install
> 32bit or 64bit version of particular package (like on x86_64)?
> 

There is 64bit glibc + lot of stuff to make 64bit gcc to build (like
xorg-x11-libs etc.). So it's ready for 64bit compilation/packages. 

It's not like x86-64. It's like ppc64. on sparc the userspace has been
32bit and still is. For x86-64 the userspace is 64bit with 32bit
support, so it's really other way around.

For ppc64 i've made myself 'all way 64bit version' to be able to
maintain those 64bit parts. For sparc64 is was too much of hasle now as
most of the stuff won't easily go 64bit. 

I am quite conservative on what i do risk now when i do have my
buildsystems up and working (32bit and other box for 64bit parts). When
i do have working installer, i'll be more wreckless once again as it
would be much easier to get back. Now it's installing Aurora 1.0,
updateing it to 1.92 and then updating to my own tree (initially it's
kernel 2.4, so you have to go thru that 1.92/2.6 w/o udev to get
there).

I do actually have one test compilation ongoing and should start about
now the building the installation images (have to make box w/
framebuffer a recent enought to be able to generate the installer. Yes,
it need keyboard/fb to make images :)



-- 
Pasi Pirhonen - upi at iki.fi - http://iki.fi/upi/