In August I picked up Elgar, a m68k machine, from NMMN in Hamburg, where it was ought to run as a buildd (NMMN donated space and network). Unfortunately it was in some kind of bad state: operating system was out of date, expansion cards were getting loose and NMMN wasn’t happy about the CRT monitor in its datacenter as well.
Elgar is an Amiga 4000 Desktop built into a custom tower case. It took some weeks and months until I found a little time to care about Elgar, but now it’s up and running again:
[ 0.000000] Initializing cgroup subsys cpuset
[ 0.000000] Initializing cgroup subsys cpu
[ 0.000000] Linux version 3.2.0-3-amiga (Debian 3.2.23-1) (debian-kernel@lists.debian.org) (gcc version 4.6.3 (Debian 4.6.3-8+m68k.1) ) #1 Wed Jul 25 13:02:31 UTC 2012
[ 0.000000] Enabling workaround for errata I14
[ 0.000000] console [debug0] enabled
[ 0.000000] Amiga hardware found: [A4000] VIDEO BLITTER AUDIO FLOPPY A4000_IDE KEYBOARD MOUSE SERIAL PARALLEL A3000_CLK CHIP_RAM PAULA LISA ALICE_PAL ZORRO3
That’s the stock Debian m68k kernel and it already runs on Arrakis and Vivaldi, two other buildds, as well without any problem. The only problem at the moment is the missing SCSI driver for the CyberStorm Mk1 accelerator card. There were some changes in the kernel that need to be dealt with by someone knowing.
The other problem was to upgrade from etch-m68k to unstable. I already blogged about this last year. It’s not as easy anymore and you’ll need to deal with lots of dependency problems and such nowadays. But anyway:
elgar:~# cat /etc/debian_version
wheezy/sid
elgar:~# dpkg -l libc6
Desired=Unknown/Install/Remove/Purge/Hold
| Status=Not/Inst/Conf-files/Unpacked/halF-conf/Half-inst/trig-aWait/Trig-pend
|/ Err?=(none)/Reinst-required (Status,Err: uppercase=bad)
||/ Name Version Architecture Description
+++-====================-===============-===============-==============================================
ii libc6:m68k 2.13-35 m68k Embedded GNU C Library: Shared libraries
It’s amazing that the m68k port is in such good condition after more than 4 years. That’s because of the real great work of Torsten Glaser who is doing much of the porter work for the tool chain. But m68k has currently 4833 packages in state Needs-Build:
wanna-build statistics - Mon Nov 12 06:51:13 CET 2012 ----------------------------------------------------- Distribution unstable: --------------------- Installed : 1321 Needs-Build : 4833 Building : 0 Uploaded : 0 Failed : 0 Dep-Wait : 0 Reupload-Wait : 0 Install-Wait : 0 Failed-Removed : 0 Dep-Wait-Removed: 0 Not-For-Us : 0 total : 9906 13.34% (1321) up-to-date, 13.34% (1321) including uploaded 48.79% (4833) need building 0.00% ( 0) currently building 0.00% ( 0) failed/dep-wait 0.00% ( 0) old failed/dep-wait 0.00% ( 0) need porting or cause the buildd serious grief
So, there’s a lot of work to do, but it’s apparent that m68k won’t keep up with 10.000 packages in unstable. When I started running an autobuilder back in year 2000 there were 2400 packages for m68k, on Aug. 15th 2005 we had a total of 5949 packages in the archive. For m68k this means that we will have to start adding lots of packages to Not-For-Us. I think m68k will/should end up with approx. 4000 packages at most.
In the end m68k is a fairly good shape now. It only needs to get some packages built… Let’s see when the buildds are operational again… 😉