Re: [PATCH 00/27] sparc32: sunset sun4m and sun4d

[Mark Cave-Ayland <mark.cave-ayland@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On 20/12/2023 10:47, Arnd Bergmann wrote:

> On Wed, Dec 20, 2023, at 09:54, John Paul Adrian Glaubitz wrote:
> > On Wed, 2023-12-20 at 08:36 +0000, Arnd Bergmann wrote:
> > > All of these were found through inspection rather than testing,
> > > so there is a good chance that other fatal kernel bugs prevent
> > > testing in qemu, at least until the fixes from Andreas' tree
> > > are included.
> >
> > Andreas has fixes for these issues?
>
> Not sure, all I know is that
>
> - Andreas has some fixes for Leon in his tree
> - Sam is unable to boot mainline in qemu
> - There is an unknown set of bugs in sparc32 since it has not
>    been tested for many years without Andreas' patches
>
> it appears that the qemu developers are still testing the sun4m
> model against old Linux and Solaris installations [1], but
> failure to run the leon3 model could still be any combination
> of kernel, qemu or configuration problems.
>
>          Arnd
>
> [1] https://wiki.qemu.org/Documentation/Platforms/SPARC#Compatibility

Hi all: I'm one of the QEMU sun4m and sun4u maintainers so thought it would be worth 
a few comments here.

My SPARC work on QEMU is unsponsored, so of course it is reliant upon me finding time 
between work and family to fix various bugs. This means that I simply don't have the 
time to constantly build and test the latest kernels: what generally happens is that 
someone pings me a regression bug report when something breaks and provides a test 
kernel/rootfs for me to look at. In the past both Rob Landley and Guenter Roeck have 
often flagged regressions and kindly provided these for me.

Other than that I just assume that everything is still working against the upstream 
kernel.

The leon3_generic machine is maintained by different people so I'd suggest contacting 
them: see [1] for their contact details. I see there is an avocado boot test for the 
leon3_generic machine included within the QEMU source tree, but it uses a 
downloadable image of HelenOS rather than Linux.


ATB,

Mark.

[1] https://gitlab.com/qemu-project/qemu/-/blob/master/MAINTAINERS?ref_type=heads#L1696