Debian Sparc64 port
Contents
Rationale for such a port
- Debian currently only supports 64-bit kernels.
- The current userland is 32-bit, but needs a SPARC V9 CPU, which supports 64-bit instructions.
- 32-bit toolchain is not anymore supported upstream.
More and more softwares are dropping 32-bit support
The use of > 4GB per process is not that uncommon those days, especially in scientific computation applications.
Sparc64 buildd status
Contact: sparc64 buildd maintainers <sparc64@buildd.debian.org>
Bootstrapping sparc64
If you are currently on debian sparc, you cannot point to sparc64 packages directly. In the meanwhile, you might be able to run it on a chroot. Usual tool for putting together a root filesystem in Debian is debootstrap, but the port is provided by two different suites and debootstrap is not smart enough to cope with it. multistrap can be used to pull from debian-ports mirror. You can select mirror nearest to you via Debian Ports page.
$ cat >> sparc64.conf <<"EOF" # Example multistrap configuration file for a sid build chroot # Need to use cascading to select the toolchain for a cross arch. [General] arch=sparc64 directory=sparc64-port # same as --tidy-up option if set to true cleanup=true # same as --no-auth option if set to true # keyring packages listed in each debootstrap will # still be installed. noauth=true # extract all downloaded archives (default is true) unpack=true # the order of sections is not important. # the debootstrap option determines which repository # is used to calculate the list of Priority: required packages. debootstrap=Base Base-unreleased aptsources=Base [Base] packages=apt dpkg-dev apt-utils whiptail locales source=http://ftp.debian-ports.org/debian keyring=debian-ports-archive-keyring suite=unstable omitdebsrc=true [Base-unreleased] packages= source=http://ftp.debian-ports.org/debian suite=unreleased omitdebsrc=true EOF $ /usr/sbin/multistrap -f sparc64.conf $ sudo mount --bind /dev sparc64-port/dev $ sudo mount --bind /sys sparc64-port/sys $ sudo mount --bind /proc sparc64-port/proc $ sudo chroot sparc64-port dpkg --configure -a When asked if you want to use dash as the default system /bin/sh to improve performance, say "n" or the setup will fail. $ echo "export debian_chroot=chroot1" >> sparc64-port/root/.bashrc $ sudo chroot sparc64-port (Test and Enjoy)
Apt-line
deb http://ftp.debian-ports.org/debian sid main deb-src http://http.debian.net/debian sid main deb http://ftp.debian-ports.org/debian unreleased main deb-src http://ftp.debian-ports.org/debian unreleased main
Qemu-system-sparc64
Running Debian under qemu-system-sparc64 Sparc64Qemu
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