Re: [Re: Enabling FPU emulation]
On Mon, Jul 31, 2000 at 10:06:50PM -0600, TOUGH GUY wrote:
> Henry Garcia <compdata@nb.net> wrote:
>
> You really don't have a successful install unless it successfully works. At
> least, not in my opinion. I've talked with Christian Steiges and Michael
> Schmitz
> (Debian Developers for the m68k linux versions). They say that FPU emulation
> has
> been built into the kernel as far back as the Slink version. I believe Roman
Wrong, I never said such a thing. Michael says it, since he built the mac
kernels. I have no big idea about mac linux/m68k or whatever you call it.
> Hodek was responsible for writing the code. However, they don't use m68k
Hmm, maybe the other Roman? But I'm being picky now.
> machines
> to test the FPU emulation. They use cross compilers and m68k emulators on
> different boxes (not m68k).
HUMBUG! You got something completely wrong. Of course we build all m68k
kernels on m68k machines (at least I do, Nick does it for VME and I think
Michael did so as well). You can crosscompile things, but it is usually not
recommended. Its ok if you cross compile a kernel for your own private use,
but not the kernel which goes in the debian distribution. My opinion, YMMV.
The only time we used an emulator, was when I tested the macinstall files on
my Amiga. I have no mac but I have a mac emulator, I just wanted to see how
Penguin is doing. Thats the only time I remember, but I don't know what the
others do in their spare time. Just for the record, again, the emulator
crashed the whole machine immediately when I wanted to boot maclinux.
Penguin looked nice though. End of emulator.
> Thus, I haven't heard of anyone being successful installing the Linux on m68k
> who
> doesn't have an FPU. Tragic, but true. What Debian needs is a Mac user who is
> willling to donate his time to help develop the Linux OS for m68k users. They
> have done a great job with the resources they have--better than anyone else.
> But
> they could use some more hel;p.
Right, but note that there is a difference between linux-m68k developers and
debian-m68k developers, at least on the paper. The linux-m68k (or
maclinux-m68k) guys work on the kernel, they do the FPU stuff. The
debian-m68k people only recompile debian packages on m68k machines. We don't
necessarily need a mac there. It would only be nice to have one for
_testing_ the packages, but if they work on Amigas, they should work on Macs
as well.
What would be very useful is a mac to test the baseinstall. There we can
only guess and have to rely on the users. The baseinstall is different on
every subarch, different in that you boot the machine into linux differently
from AmigaOS, TOS, MacOS, whatever. Different when it comes to partitioning
the harddisk. And different hardware, mainly grafics. When that is done, all
m68k machines are created equal.
> On a side note, i was able to get NetBSD running fully on the same system, so
> that FPU code might be one good place to take a look for ideas. As for the
Just do it. Learn from the code and use what you learned (not the code you
read!) to improve the linux driver. You have to source, just do it.
> methods for testing with cross compilers and emulators, i sure wasnt aware of
> that, and I agree that its unfortunate that it must be done this way most of
> the time. Nonetheless, I'd like to try one of the newer kernels, so if you or
> anyone could drop me a line as to how i could install debian with one of these
> newer kernels from the ftp site at the get go, that's be great. Especially
> since i obviously cant copy it over by floppy within linux after installing.
You are using the macinstall.tgz or the mac subdirectory? Just get the
kernel image out of the file you got from the ftp site, usually vmlinux or
vmlinuz (but I wouldnt wonder if its called maclinux, since the mac is
special) and put it into the mac subdirectory on your harddisk. Point the
Penguin to the new kernel image, you might rename it to linux (the kernel
image from the install files) then you do not have to change the Penguin
options (probably, I have no mac to test...). Boot. Should work, at least
partially. The problem I see is that you can not use the modules which are
provided by the debian installer. If there are some in the file from the
ftp site, you have to hack them into the system yourself. But you should get
pretty far without the modules and build your own kernel afterwards.
Now, if I get a kernelimage package with the kernel you want to use I might
be able to build a new install set for mac. I heard Michael is working on
it, but those things take their time.
Christian
--
Read the FAQ! http://www.linux-m68k.org/faq/faq.html
Download the FAQ! ftp://ftp.uni-erlangen.de/pub/Linux/680x0/FAQ/FAQ.gz
WHERE IS MY XF86CONFIG????? http://www.debian.org/~cts/debian-m68k-faq
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