Well, damn. Advokitty is fast for once. I haven't posted here in a while, been busy. Here's the current musings:
Over the holiday break, I got Red Hat Linux 8.0 running on my ProGear touchpad tablet PC. Only thing not working is the PCMCIA. When I get bored again, I'm going to rebuild the kernel to see if I can fix it.
Aurora:
I put my foot down and said that there will be a new release in January, because if I didn't, it would keep being tuned and tweaked indefinitely.
Fixed the O(1)+low latency implementation for sparc64 (#1) so that it worked again. Decided to include it in the next release.
SS2 at work is really on its last legs. Its doing odd, unreproducable bad things. Going to take it out back and shoot it...err... return it to the donor as soon as I can replace it. Chris Hedemark donated a LOT of older Sun hardware to Aurora, so I need to go through that pile and perform triage on it. Best item: a WORKING (#2) Sun 4/300. No, I'm not really planning on supporting sun4 in Aurora. That would require far more than its worth. I just like old hardware, sue me.
There be dragons in the sparc64 VM. Thats my guess. It could be a bug in the O(1) implementation, but doing a mke2fs call in the GUI mode of anaconda (not TUI mode, that works fine) hard locks a sparc64. Hard lock as in, can't drop to prom. How do we resolve this? We run it through strace. It works then. Say it with me, Voo Doo.
Large disks partitioning/formatting in GUI mode (again not TUI) also hard locks the system. Even with mke2fs being run through strace. I'm going to generate a build with parted also run through strace and see if that resolves the issue.
Yes, I do realize thats incredibly hackish and bad.
Onboard network adapters aren't being properly autodetected on the U10, but the driver works fine, and the proper entries are in the kudzu sbus probing code. Same goes for the SCSI controller on the SS2. And some of the sym53c8xx controllers (SunBlade 2000). I can't find a good reason why.
Fixed USB implementations in both GUI and TUI. TUI didn't work at all in the last build on USB driven machines. Works almost perfectly now. Mouse isn't being autodetected, still can't pin down exactly why, but it works when you choose Generic 3 Button (USB).
The "parted" bug in 0.42 is very dead, the stock parted code for sparc is, well, bad. No offense to Ben C, but ick. It was misreading a huge subsect of disks. I don't claim to have made the code any cleaner, but at least the Aurora parted works on every disk I can throw at it now.
Sound detection is a little weird on some boxes. *shrug* sndconfig tried to load the sun4c audio driver on the SunBlade 2000. Shockingly enough, it didn't work.
Although, everything else worked like a charm. It ran like a bat out of hell. :) I just wish it was my machine to keep.
Added cipe to the kernel. Didn't think it would work, but it seems to have built ok. It works on alpha, so it should work on sparc. I'm going to let Ingo test that.
The tree is too large to install off a single CD now. *shrug*
The GUI installer does bad things when dealing with Ingo's SS20 video card, because it has more memory than the standard, and I don't really have a good way to probe for it. Maybe if I had it in one of my machines, and another month... :/
Sun4d still doesn't work.
I really need a second apartment just for all this sparc stuff. I'm not complaining, just stating the obvious.
Looking at the small amount of sparc/sparc64 kernel code that I grok, reminds me how much I admire Pete & Dave (and Rob) for hacking in there. I'm not really a programmer, I just play one on TV. Those guys are programmers.
No one is still reading this. Apologies for the long entry.