Debian installer

On 07/28/2018 06:34 PM, John Paul Adrian Glaubitz wrote:
> We might want to tackle the installer on ia64 next, but that should
> probably go onto the ia64 mailing list. The FTBFS of d-i on most
> ports architectures should have been fixed with this [1] commit.
> [...]
>> [1] https://salsa.debian.org/installer-team/debian-installer/commit/b4ec9f8a40c0f1a3a077d32debf751bc1c1b3b9f

I'd definitely be interested. But due to the heat at the moment I don't 
(want to) run my Itanium gear (or any other of my bigger/hotter 
machines) that much.

A few remaining issues should be solved before putting our hands on d-i:

## Bootloader ##

elilo is no longer built for ia64 since Jessie and I'm not sure if GRUB 
is already working well on ia64. I made good experience with elilo from 
Wheezy, it works with everything I tested (Wheezy/Wheezy backports and 
Gentoo kernels) so far, e.g. it was able to load a manually created ~120 
MiB (!) initramfs via netboot for a Gentoo installation in mid 2017. I 
haven't yet tested the current Gentoo version of elilo ([2]) which is 
more recent.

[2]: https://packages.gentoo.org/packages/sys-boot/elilo

## Linux kernel ##

So far we don't have a working Debian Linux kernel for ia64. All tested 
4.x Debian Linux kernels show the same issue:

```
[ 0.052000] Kernel panic - not syncing: corrupted stack end detected 
inside scheduler
```

...as mentioned in [3] throughout rx2620, rx4640, rx2660 and rx2800 i2. 
I tested up to 4.18.0-rc3 without luck.

[3]: https://lists.debian.org/debian-ia64/2018/06/msg00000.html

I therefore used the current stable Gentoo kernel sources (v4.14.52, 
[4]) to build a working Linux kernel for ia64.

[4]: https://packages.gentoo.org/packages/sys-kernel/gentoo-sources

May I ask what Linux kernel version you are running on the buildds (lenz 
and titanium as per [5]) and what type of machines these are?

[5]: https://monitor.jrtc27.com/

Cheers,
Frank