Gentoo on SPARC
Okay, I been meaning to post more but I never think of it, then get too lazy. But here is another attempt at it.
I have been avoiding work (at work) and have begun playing around with loading Gentoo on a SunBlade 100 we have laying around here. Well, it is not exactly avoiding work, as I would like to get an OS running faster than what Solaris9 is running at. Monies are always tight, so this would help to extend the life of these suckers for a little bit longer. They’re not bad little machines, plus they it is always fun to play around with different hardware. I don’t know what it is about Sun stuff, but SPARC always tweaks my interests.
Anyways, I am stuck trying to get the kernel complied. It keeps bombing out at various points with “undefined reference” errors. First it was _mcount on init.o and ALi 5451 drivers. I tried various tweaks in the .config, but couldn’t get it to work. So I reformated the paritions and tried it again.
This time, however, it bombed out with “undefined reference to ‘virt_to_bus_not_defined_use_pci_map’” on the Ali5451 drivers. So I have disabled those drivers. Thing that sucks is that it takes so long before it bombs out. I’ve combed the forums, but nothing sticks out. Hmph, seems to compling fine as I type.
It also stinks that I have to use a 2.4 kernel; I haven’t used one of those in years. Once I get it up and running though, I will atempt to up it to 2.6. If I get this running, we got a several Netra based servers sitting around that I can play with.
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