Hi,
We're in the process of migrating Debian for sparc64 from SILO to GRUB
as GRUB upstream is adding support for modern SPARC machines thanks to
the work of Eric Snowberg from Oracle.
In order to make sure GRUB works on all machines supported by the sparc64
port, we need your help to test GRUB on your particular hardware, the older
your machine, the better.
[...]
7. Report back to the list and include your hardware and partition setup
A bit late to the party, as SILO already appears to be gone (including
the repos) and all install images use GRUB now, but I'm having trouble
and wanted to report this - and maybe get some ideas, in case this is
the best address to do so:
I'm in the process of migrating most of our SPARC servers running
Solaris 10 & the old Debian with 32bit SPARC userland to the SPARC64
debport.
Some servers running Solaris 11 will follow.
Installing on two SunFire v215 went reasonably well
/- (apart from recurring Kernel Panics with "Unable to handle kernel
paging request in mna handler", most often triggered on boot immediately
after the systemd binfmt service tries to start. This seems to have been
mentioned in /2020/04/msg00020.html but never pinpointed and fixed?) -/
but I can't seem to be able to configure GRUB on these servers as I did
in the past with SILO (a 2-disk mdraid with mirrored /boot, / and swap).
I'm currently stuck with /boot on only one disk and the rest of the
system mirrored as I can't figure out how to install grub for a mirrored
/boot partition:
1) Installing to the mirror device always yields a Segmentation Fault. I
was unable to get any clue with my limited gdb experience as to why -
(with loaded debug symbols etc.: "Backtrace stopped: previous frame
identical to this frame (corrupt stack?)"):
# grub-install --skip-fs-probe --force --debug /dev/md0
[...]
grub-install: info: setting the root device to
`mduuid/1ae243c1e2445aef777f4d32b671f41c'.
grub-install: warning: File system `ext2' doesn't support embedding.
grub-install: warning: Embedding is not possible. GRUB can only be
installed in this setup by using blocklists. However, blocklists are
UNRELIABLE and their use is discouraged..
grub-install: info: will leave the core image on the filesystem.
Segmentation fault
2) Trying to install to the individual disk partitions or the raw disk
itself:
grub-install: warning: File system `ext2' doesn't support embedding.
grub-install: error: embedding is not possible, but this is required
for RAID and LVM install.
[...]
grub-install: warning: Partition style `sun' doesn't support embedding.
grub-install: error: embedding is not possible, but this is required
for RAID and LVM install.
Neither different filesystems (ext2, xfs, ...) nor different mdraid
metadata formats made any difference.
I can't test other disk labels, as the old OBP doesn't handle GPT AFAIR.
Also, GRUB built from the most recent official sources from their git
segfaults as well.
Any pointers how to achieve this setup? What can I test or does someone
else have a similar setup working? Am I doing something horribly wrong?
I don't think mdraid-mirrored bootdisks should be too uncommon on this
hardware.
Thanks and cheers to the community keeping SPARC alive :-)
Robin