Development/Ports/Sparc

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Mandriva on Sparc howto

Here you'll find some hints on how to get your sparc running Mandriva until we do a new (installable) release.


Initial ramblings..

Okay! The recommended way of installing Mandriva on your sparc as of day is:

  • Boot off a Gentoo livecd
  • Create some partitions for where to place stuff
  • Fetch http://84.210.3.98/sparc/cooker-20060605.tar.gz which is a complete installation
  • Extract the archive at the root of an empty partition (eg. /dev/hda5 mounted on /mnt/mandriva)
  • Now that you have a complete installation you can chroot to it like this: chroot /mnt/mandriva
  • To make your installation bootable now you should update silo, (kernel 2.6.15 which boots on my blade 100 with atyfb fixes is included in the archive under boot), fstab, ..(might be more that I don't remember just now) for your needs.
  • When you have done so and updated silo you should be able to boot your Mandriva installation when rebooting.

New design

Support for old sparcs is poor/broken for 2.6 kernel and David Miller has stated that it requires a fair amount of work of getting it working. Building for old sparcv7 gives quite some performance penalties, especially on stuff that relies heavy on math due to not having math registers added in sparcv8. Especially openssl is hit by this and needs actually be patched to build for sparcv7 as they've removed it. With kernel not being good to go for older sparcs, maintainers not being in posession of hardware, it giving reduced performance, making it a bigger effort to maintain where one wants stuff especially optimized for sparcv8/sparcv9 as well etc., we might as well just kill it off and go for building for sparcv9 as default. For 64 bit packages we only want the toolchain built (gcc, glibc, etc.) that makes sense, otherwise building for 64 bit we only improve size of binaries, while imposing perfomance penalties unless what is built takes advantage of 64 bit.. Short summary, more details to come, researched & worked on, references to document things etc. Ultimate goal of these changes is improved easy of maintainance and also performancewise.

At http://84.210.3.98/sparc/ you can find stuff I've been fiddling around with that might help you out until I patch things up for real.. :)

Some docs on installer...

https://cvs.mandriva.com/cgi-bin/viewvc.cgi/soft/drakx/trunk/docs/README?root=svn&view=co

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