On Tuesday, August 28, 2012 06:24:02 PM Karanbir Singh wrote: > On 08/28/2012 04:32 PM, Lamar Owen wrote: > > We finally got the electrical up (Mitsubishi 9900B 500KVA UPS woo hoo....) in our research building's data center, and have a 20 CPU Altix 3700 up, running, and available to do this. I know about and am pulling the 'c5-wip' tree Karanbir built a while back, and have allocated 1.4TB of disk on our Clariions here to the effort. Now, I know the last time this was brought up it didn't go very far; but I'm still interested in doing this, even if for private use here on our three Altix systems. > > *fear* Fear? I'm afraid you lost me there, Karanbir. In any case, I mention 'private' simply that, even if there isn't any other interest, I'm still likely to do this myself, regardless, just not as a 'signed and sealed' CentOS distribution, just a private rebuild since I want to fully utilize this donated box for science, and I don't have a cluster of x86_64 boxes available. If there's other interest, then, well that's a different story and would need a 'signed and sealed' CentOS. But my needs are more modest. I know when I e-mail the CERN SLC-ia64 maintainer a while back he said that they had stopped supporting SLC5.x on ia64 (the last DVD ISO I found of SLC5 wouldn't boot, unfortunately). > > James, did you get very far? Karanbir, what would be the chances of a 'refresh' of the ia64 c5-wip tree to 5.8? > > > > it should be fairly straightforward - the yum ( mx actually ) issues > that i ran into way back when, are also resolved now. But, is there any > interest ? Probably just from me. :-) IA64 has never been a very popular arch, but it's what I have to work with at the moment. Just need to get bootstrapped to do the builds if there isn't any other interest; the ideal, at least from my point of view, is a CentOS5.x ISO to at least get a minimal install up for building, and initializing the build environment so that I can pull the source RPM's and do the rebuild for our use (again, assuming no other interest from the wider CentOS community). I'm willing to work from a 'less than ideal' point; having the 5.8 binaries at the moment would be a fantastic second place, and working through the pointers to the build environment that have been posted in the past is my fallback. The machine came with some older SLES and RHEL DVD's along with SGI's ProPack of fairly recent vintage (last version that supported RHEL5, in fact), so I can get the box booted (in fact it is booted and running now.....). There is one EL5 rebuild for IA64 for which an older version is actually freely downloadable and could be used to bootstrap the process. (I'm trying to not use the 'O' word....). I'm perfectly fine just pulling the source RPMs and working through what I know will not be a trivial process building my own once I get the thing bootstrapped up to a CentOS 5.8 equivalent level and a buildsystem set up, assuming that there's no wider interest in the CentOS community. And I might even look at going to EL6, but as painful as that build was for everyone, it would probably take a while, and I honestly don't know if I could get that done. At least an EL6 on IA64 wouldn't have to pass upstream binary compatibility testing for the IA64 side, just the ia32el side for the few things that would need it. EL5 is sufficient for what I want that box to do. And Debian 6 is too unstable on that hardware, and everything else on site is CentOS anyway, so Debian isn't really a solid option. Anyway, thanks for the reply, it is appreciated. I'm not going to kid myself into thinking that this will be easy if I roll my own; since you already have the buildsystem set up it would be easier for you, but if there's no other interest I'll just have to slog through it myself. And I expect that it may take some time to get it just to rebuild. And I'm not even going to try to do a 'binary compatibility' test; I'll be rebuilding what we need from source anyway, so just having a reasonably close base is sufficient.