Update Debian Ports installation images 2021-04-14

[John Paul Adrian Glaubitz]

Hello!

I just uploaded updated Debian Ports installation images that were
created today and ship with the latest Debian unstable kernel (5.10)
and all other packages updated to their latest version in Debian
unstable.

If you test these images, please let me know if you run into any issues.

Adrian

[1] https://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/ports/snapshots/2021-04-14/

[John Paul Adrian Glaubitz]

Hello Carlos!

First, thank you for the great work you do with the NetInst images for m68k,
I really appreciate the effort of keeping Linux alive on this architecture.

You're welcome.

I should have on my hands shortly a 060 accelerator for my Amiga 1200 that would
allow me to test the image on real hardware. Meanwhile I tested it on WinUAE and
it looks like most of the installation is working correctly. However I am hitting
some difficulties with the disk partitioning.
Before running the kernel and debian-installer I set up my harddrive with HDToolbox
as told in [1].

Those installation instructions are ancient, so I don't recommend following them.

You should let the installer partition your hard disk, just let the Amiga create
the the affs partitions.

It looks like the kernel can identify correctly my partition scheme as seen in [2]
and... although the partitioner tool in the installer recognizes the harddisk at
/dev/hda, it is not able to identify any existing partitions, as seen in [3].

You should switch to another console during installation and check the output of

$ cat /proc/partitions

A test I was able to complete successfully is to open an installer console (ALT+F2)
and format my partition /dev/hda3 with mkfs.ext2. I can also mount it on the console.
However, regardless of that, the installer partitioner won't detect it. Is there
something that I am missing?

No, this should not happen. I have no clue though what the issue is, I would have to
reproduce this issue myself.

* Harddisk size: 32 GB
- /dev/hda1 AFFS - 518 MB
- /dev/hda2 AFFS - 12 GB
- /dev/hda3 LNX\0 - 8 GB
- /dev/hda4 SWP\0 - 512 MB
- /dev/hda5 NBR\0 - 8 GB
- /dev/hda6 NBS\0 - 512 MB
* Emulated Amiga: 1200
* ROM: 3.2 (the new one from Hyperion)

I don't know whether there are any compatibility issues with ROM version 3.2
as it has never been tested. Although I have these ROM versions myself in my
storage place.

FWIW, I never personally had success installing Debian on UAE but I haven't
tested that for a while.

Adrian

[Dirk Heinrichs]

I gave up with the hd-media initrd, so for the time being I don't know
how I could install the system on a real Amiga without preparing the
HDD on the PC via WinUAE.

For people w/o a (Win)UAE license: Debian's kernels still (as of
bullseye) have support for RDB partitions and there's also amiga-fdisk
packaged for amd64:

% uname -a
Linux gondolin 5.10.0-8-amd64 #1 SMP Debian 5.10.46-4 (2021-08-03)
x86_64 GNU/Linux
% grep _AMIGA
/boot/config-5.10.0-8-amd64                                                                                   
:(
CONFIG_AMIGA_PARTITION=y
% apt-cache search amiga-fdisk
amiga-fdisk-cross - Partition editor for Amiga partitions (cross
version)


HTH...

    Dirk

[John Paul Adrian Glaubitz]

Hello!

I guess my best bet would be to try the hd-media initrd, but I tried to copy the
ISO to a FAT16 partition in the Amiga RDB disk and the d-i was not able to detect it.

The hd-media installer can be found in the debian-installer-images tarball which can be
found here [1] and here [2].

Any other installer variant but the ISO images is currently untested, so I cannot guarantee
for the hd-media installer to work.

Adrian

[1] http://ftp.ports.debian.org/debian-ports/pool-m68k/main/d/debian-installer/
[2] https://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/ports/debian-installer/

[John Paul Adrian Glaubitz]

Hello!

Afterwards it proceeds to install the base system, but eventually hangs
up in one of the "Retrieving xxxxx" packages, never going beyond 6% due
to seek errors on the CD-ROM through A1200 Gayle IDE driver (I guess due
to something odd in the emulation).

(...)
I was able to overcome the IDE CD drive errors by configuring WinUAE to emulate
the Commodore A2091 SCSI controller and attaching the CD drive to it. This was
automatically detected by d-i and the install progressed nicely without any seek
errors.

Please note that there are two IDE drivers for the Gayle controller in the 5.10.x
kernel used in Debian unstable. The legacy IDE driver called "gayle" and the new
driver "pata_gayle". The legacy IDE drivers will be dropped with the kernel 5.14
release [1].

So, you can try to blocklist either the old or the new driver on the kernel command
line with "modprobe.blacklist=gayle" or "modprobe.blacklist=pata_gayle" [2].

If neither of the drivers work, it's likely that there is a bug in the Gayle emulation
of WinUAE.

The next problem I am facing is a very specific one in the Install base system stage,
in the base-passwd package, that after "Setting up" dpkg stage in throws a segmentation
fail due to a bad kernel trap [1][2]. I tested the install twice to make sure the error
happen at the same exact point so it's not random. Once again, it could be related to
1. Has anyone in this list been successful installing Debian with the 2021-04-14 image on Amiga?

I haven't installed on a real Amiga for a longer time (around 2015/16). But I know that
installation works fine on Aranym. I never managed to install Debian inside WinUAE, so
chances are the emulation is still buggt.

2. If I were to try the image on a real Amiga without CD drive, what would be the procedure?
As I told in previous messages, the hd-media initrd looks like the right one for this case,
but where do I place the ISO image?

If you really used the actual hd-media images [3], you need to put the ISO image at the top-level
directory of the hard disk that you booted the hd-media images from [4]. But I haven't tested
hd-media images myself before.

Adrian

[1] https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Linux-5.14-Legacy-IDE-Dropped
[2] https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Kernel_module#Blacklisting
[3] http://ftp.ports.debian.org/debian-ports/pool-m68k/main/d/debian-installer/
[4] https://www.debian.org/releases/etch/i386/apas02.html.en