Mon, 10 May 2010
Fedora 12 SPARC beta
I have pushed a fedora 12 beta sparc tree the master mirror, you can find one close to you Here under /releases/test/12-Beta/sparc/ the tree is pretty much complete. there are a few broken deps that need resolving. Partitioning is fragile. it mostly works however sometimes you will be best off to do manual partitioning in rescue mode or breaking out into a shell.
Here is a quick list of some of the issues you might hit and workarounds.
- serial console install - to have a console on the serial port post install pass "console=ttyS0,9600" to the installer
- serial console install - to do any customisation at all you need to use vnc
- sunblade systems with qlogic hba's for primary storage - Make sure that you do a graphical install (vnc or local X) or kickstart and include "hardware support" this is so that you have the firmware for your primary storage
- install blowing up at partitioning - parted doesnt seem to like old parted disk labels. in rescue mode "dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdX bs=512 count=2" where X == the valuse of each disk
- partitioning is fragile - simple partitioning works fine more complicated setups might require you to manual use parted to setup the partitioning you want and then choosing custom partitiing and allocate as you need to
- less than 512mb ram - using vnc you may get OOM during package install. you will need to either do a default install or select a smaller package set
- repo issues when installing - There is not repos exactly as anaconda wants when doing a netinstall. you can pass repo="path to mirror" or fix up in the gui
Oh and partitioning is fragile, it looks like F-13 will be better
And things ive likely forgotten or missed, please drop into #fedora-sparc on freenode for assistance, questions or feedback.
posted at: 16:58 | link | | 0 comments
Thu, 14 May 2009
Humbug talk May 16
This saturday at 6pm AEST im going to give a talk at humbug on "Fedora, SPARC, spacewalk. An open source world" if anyone is in South East Queensland and wants to come along feel free. Apparently QUT and UQ students have been invited. It will be intresting to see what changes QUT has made since I graduated from there.
posted at: 00:43 | link | | 0 comments
Tue, 14 Apr 2009
Fedora 11 SPARC status
today i did a rawhide sparc compose from dist-f11 rather than dist-f9 that we had been using, Im syncing that right now to the primary mirror. it will take a little while since its really big.
16G /mnt/koji/tree/development/source 22G /mnt/koji/tree/development/sparc 13G /mnt/koji/tree/development/sparc64
If you have been keeping your SPARC boxes updated you should be pointing at the F-9 bits and not rawhide still. Ify your not please dont updat to this tree. at the least you need to grab the F-10 rpm from koji. We have Stronger hases just like the primary arches. No work has been done on anaconda at this point. we have a glibc bug that we are waiting on a patch to be applied then we can catch up. most of the packages are from pre mass rebuild state. but it is the closest that we have ever been to being in the same state as the primary arches. we have a kernel that ws built with gcc-4.4 It has been tested and does work :)
Fedora SPARC Linux is built for ultrasparc and newer hardware only. There is no support for any 32 bit hardware. we are shipping a 32 bit userland and 64 bit kernel. if you have specific needs for greater than 4gb ram per process you can enable the 64 bit repo and install 64 bit userland apps.
posted at: 03:07 | link | | 1 comments
Wed, 01 Apr 2009
Busy Busy Busy
Its been awhile since i've posted anything. I have been really busy. Its hard to believe that Macy is 4 months old already. Im sure everyone has has heard it before but Babies are amzing. It really is different when it is your own baby. Her first Passport will arrive soon, we have a trip planed to Australia in May. Once we get back ill submit whats needed so she can be an Aussie citizen also. travelling with a nearly 6 month old should be interesting, and our direct flight from Brisbane to LA got cnacelled so we get an extra flight though Sydney home all up we fly PIA -> ORD -> LAX -> BNE -> SYD -> LAX -> DFW -> PIA. we are considering flying to Melbourne for a few days so i can show Jenny where i was born and grew up as a kid and take Macy to meet my Nanna.
Something i've been working on alot lately is secondary arches. It feels like we are finally getting over the hump and making good progress with them. s390 is making good progress, as is arm, and even alpha. No one seems to want to do the right thing with ia64, which is kinda sad. SPARC is rolling along nicely and someone stepped up this week to do parisc. If someone wants to do mips drop me an email.
Today we released spacewalk 0.5, it still depends on oracle :( but we are making progress towards being able to work using postgresql. 0.5 runs on fedora :) thats something im proud that we have finally done. We are slowly working out how spacewalk fits in and how to do things. Its a big change in how satellite has been developed. The spacewalk/Satellite devs are finding there feet and doing a great job of working in the open with the community. slowly there is contributions from outside of Red Hat which is great to see Colin Coe is doing a grea job of supporting spacewalk. I was talking with some guys in #humbug last week, they were talking about setting up spacewalk. I cant remeber if id never said what i do for a job or if they just forgot. but it was cool to see spacewalk talk going on in other places. They are very excited about having a full open source stack. I think that Postgresql support will be warmly welcomed by everyone. If someone wanted to get involved in spacewalk development it would be awesome to look at integrating func, bcfg2 ( or some other config management system), looking at extenting monitoring perhaps by integarting another tool such as nagios or zabbix. There really is endless possibilities on what can be done. so if you have an itch that you want to scratch introduce yourself on the spacewalk-devel list and get to work :)
overall i've been extremly busy. I have alot that I want to get done on my house this year. hopefully last weeks freak snow storm is the last till next winter. I have alot fo garden work I want to do as well as finsihing the dining room, library, and my office. dining room i need to finish installing trim. Library i need to strip the hundred year old wall paper and patch up the plaster. then install crown molding to finish off the book selves to the ceiling, and my office i want to paint, install a window seat with storage on one wall, install new flooring and install trim. Id really like to have the carpet pulled up and get the floors polished. one of the benfits of having a house thats over 150 years old is the character. sadly the people who owned the house before us pulled alot of it out. My dad is a builder and i worked with him from the time i was 12 or 13 on school breaks. as well as for awhile after i finished high school. It is a blessing and a curse. I insist on doing everything myself, because I know hwo to do it. However I dont always want to do it, but i'm too stubbourn to get someone in to do it. My Father in law is always telling me that im doing things the old school way. but thats how I learnt to do things so its how I do them. I think to think that i do a good job.
posted at: 04:12 | link | | 0 comments
Tue, 03 Jun 2008
Building Sulpher for SPARC
Trying to get everything build for Fedora 9 for SPARC, I threw some jobs at the build system this weekend. We have two builders, they are as follows:
A T1000 named daedalus, it has 16gb ram and a 8 x 1ghz core, multithreaded niagara cpu. it is a 32 way system. It has been doing well with the load. Id like to get the load average up higher. koji cant get jobs to it quick enough. here is todays load average graphs for it.
A T2000 named korolev, it has 8gb ram and a 8 x 1ghz core, multithreaded niagara cpu. it is a 32 way system. It has also been doing well.
This is part of the Secondary Architecure proposal. We are getting there slowly. If you want to help feel free to put up your hand. we can find tasks for people to do. People will also see mail for packages they own. we are going to try cut as much of it out as we can. but you will get noticies for failures. some of the ones we have seen so far are due to changes in qt packaging for instance. it is alot of challenging rewarding work to get things up. Building on all these different architectures helps ensure code is portable. Please mention in your dealings with upstream that we are building on lots of architectures. some that are rarely done. for instance due to how koji works we are building all sparc packages sparc32 and sparc64 even though historically little has been built sparc64 as there is no gains from doing so.
There is currently 3 hubs up and runnings ia64, s390, and SPARC. with arm and alpha to follow. perhaps even mips or hppa or some other architecture you like. Just some of the cool things Fedora is doing to let people scratch their own itch.
posted at: 21:27 | link | | 0 comments