Hello! On 1/4/21 6:38 PM, Dennis Clarke wrote: > Firstly I want to say that you have done more than most people have ever > done here to ensure we the people have Debian on ports type machines. > You have been doing all the heavy lifting for years. That is not even > remotely fair.
Thanks for the praise. > Having said that I must also say it is difficult to step into your shoes as > there is nothing easy about what you do. I have long wanted to be able > to create my own installer images but the process is mystical, magical > and not well documented. Lets not concern ourselves over that at this > time. I think I have explained before how that works and it's not actually that complicated per se. The main requirement is that you set up a local mirror with reprepro. It's explained on the PA-RISC kernel wiki: > https://parisc.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/How_to_create_Debian_unstable_iso_images In practice, you will just have to perform the steps 2.1 and 2.2, ignore 2.3 and 2.4 (except for powerpc and ppc64) and use my debian-cd configuration (the one on the wiki contains some errors). For powerpc and ppc64, you will need to patch grub-installer and partman-auto locally because I haven't upstreamed the necessary changes yet - as I'm currently still not happy with the current approach. > I have ppc64 and ppc64le and sparc64 here in my lab and I want to look > at the sparc64 case where everything "just works" but I have not seen > that yet. I want to use the installer image from 2021-01-03 with the > hope that both ppc64 and sparc64 are based on the same sources for the > parted/partman tools. Well, installing sparc64 works out of the box. I'm not sure what issues are there from the installer side. If there are any, please report them to the debian-sparc mailing list. >>> And if someone wants to debug the issue with the hanging partionier >>> themselves, >>> check out the log in /var/log/partman on a second terminal while the >>> partionier >>> is running. > > I will take a look at both PPC64 and PPC64le and then for extra > information I will take a stare at SPARC64 but I am not sure to > what degree that will be reasonable data. The issue shows on 32-bit PowerPC only. So you won't see anything on these platforms. >> So it's crashing after the second "OK" in line 1221: >> > > Right. I will start the investigation here in my little lab and also see > if I can bring in some smart people to look at the issue. To be fair I > am not very well informed about the boot process but I am It's been localized down to "ped_disk_new(device_named(device_name)" in line 1224. So it's a crash libparted. And one theory is that this crash occurs due to the Mac partitioning scheme. So, in theory the issue could go away when starting with a disk with no partition table (or an MS-DOS partition table). >>> https://salsa.debian.org/installer-team/partman-base/-/blob/master/parted_server.c#L1221 >> >> I wonder what's special on 32-bit PowerPC that it started crashing there. >> > > I am going to review the traffic here in the maillist and also begin an > install on SPARC64 and see if I can at least look at where things > differ. If you want to produce useful data that will help with this investigation, try installing the 32-bit PowerPC variant on a completely empty disk. You can even do that on your PowerMac G5. But you should verify first that you can reproduce the issue on your machine. Thus: - Download the current 32-bit PowerPC ISO - Try installing on your G5 which should have an existing Mac partitioning - If it hangs during the start of the partioning tool, you reproduced the problem - Then wipe the disk completely, e.g. dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda bs=1M count=10 - Now try again with the wiped disk and see if the partioning tool starts normally; if it does, it's either a bug in the Mac label [1] code or the HFS fs code [2]. Adrian > [1] https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/parted.git/tree/libparted/labels/mac.c > [2] https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/parted.git/tree/libparted/fs/hfs -- .''`. John Paul Adrian Glaubitz : :' : Debian Developer - glaub...@debian.org `. `' Freie Universitaet Berlin - glaub...@physik.fu-berlin.de `- GPG: 62FF 8A75 84E0 2956 9546 0006 7426 3B37 F5B5 F913
