I think this is pretty much well known but I will report it here regardless. From the latest sparc64 installer images I eventually see grub-ieee1275 fails.
>From the end of the syslog : Jan 4 19:00:00 in-target: The following additional packages will be installed: Jan 4 19:00:00 in-target: grub-ieee1275-bin grub2-common Jan 4 19:00:00 in-target: The following NEW packages will be installed: Jan 4 19:00:00 in-target: grub-ieee1275 grub-ieee1275-bin grub2-common Jan 4 19:00:02 in-target: 0 upgraded, 3 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded. Jan 4 19:00:02 in-target: Need to get 2031 kB of archives. Jan 4 19:00:02 in-target: After this operation, 5943 kB of additional disk space will be used. Jan 4 19:00:02 in-target: Get:1 http://deb.debian.org/debian-ports sid/main sparc64 grub2-common sparc64 2.04-11 [719 kB] Jan 4 19:00:04 in-target: Err:2 http://deb.debian.org/debian-ports sid/main sparc64 grub-ieee1275-bin sparc64 2.04-11 Jan 4 19:00:04 in-target: 503 Backend unavailable, connection timeout [IP: 2a04:4e42:58::644 80] Jan 4 19:00:04 in-target: Get:3 http://deb.debian.org/debian-ports sid/main sparc64 grub-ieee1275 sparc64 2.04-11 [542 kB] Jan 4 19:00:05 in-target: Fetched 1261 kB in 4s (316 kB/s) Jan 4 19:00:05 in-target: E Jan 4 19:00:05 in-target: : Jan 4 19:00:05 in-target: Failed to fetch http://deb.debian.org/debian-ports/pool-sparc64/main/g/grub2/grub-ieee1275-bin_2.04-11_sparc64.deb 503 Backend unavailable, connection timeout [IP: 2a04:4e42:58::644 80] Jan 4 19:00:05 in-target: Jan 4 19:00:05 in-target: E Jan 4 19:00:05 in-target: : Jan 4 19:00:05 in-target: Unable to fetch some archives, maybe run apt-get update or try with --fix-missing? Jan 4 19:00:05 in-target: Jan 4 19:00:05 grub-installer: info: Calling 'apt-install grub-ieee1275' failed The entire log is at https://beta.genunix.com/debian_boot/sparc64/syslog_2021-01-03.txt I think, for the moment, the ppc64 installer is a higher priority. -- Dennis Clarke RISC-V/SPARC/PPC/ARM/CISC UNIX and Linux spoken GreyBeard and suspenders optional