David Cantrell wrote:
> Well, I don't know. I've certainly never seen one. If one doesn't exist,
> why is it an option in the kernel for 32-bit SPARC machines? Looking at
> what Debian does, I see that they offer a kernel image named "sun4dm_pci".
> I know that Sun never made a 32-bit SPARC system that used PCI, but
> perhaps a clone manufacturer did. I just can't understand why it's an
> option if there were no machines built that way.
My guess is perhaps someone decided to just not exclude it, in case there
was such a machine by a clone maker. Apparently 32-bit SPARC CPUs are
still made, perhaps for embedded market, but someone could slap one on a
PCI based board in place of Intel and sell it a general small system.
Of course we'd want to run Slackware on it :-)
> I'm sure that if such a machine exists, there are a very small number of
> them. Even the first UltraSPARC systems from Sun used SBus...they didn't
> start using PCI until a couple years later.
Perhaps the philosophy was "if I don't have a reason to leave a hole in
the feature matrix, why should I". Of course there being no such machines
to do testing on, it was buggy. Apparently no one thought to test the
"wrong" kernel option to see how well it detects when to activate itself.
> OK, the argument aside, has anyone built a kernel on a 32-bit SPARC system
> with the PCI option enabled and booted it to verify that it does the same
> thing that the 32-bit SPARC kernels do in the distribution? We all seem
> to agree that this is the cause of the problem, but I'd just like someone
> to test out the theory before I rebuild the kernels and upload them to the
> FTP site.
I recompiled, but never changed configs or even tried it. I was going to
give 2.4 a try, so I haven't been concerned about 2.2, and I still don't
have a video hookup, yet (have to tear down a much of connections to other
machines to hook the Sparcs up, since they aren't working via KVM switch).
Now that I reached my first milestone on my bootable CD project, I could
take some time and swap some cables around and test it.
-- ----------------------------------------------------------------- | Phil Howard - KA9WGN | Dallas | http://linuxhomepage.com/ | | phil-nospam@ipal.net | Texas, USA | http://phil.ipal.org/ | -----------------------------------------------------------------
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Thu Sep 19 2002 - 11:00:02 PDT