Hello everyone, this is just a short update on the status of the parisc port from my point of view, including a short summary of what have been done during the last few weeks and what is planned for the near future. So, what's the status of the Linux kernel for parisc? Basically, I think all major outstanding kernel patches are now in the upcoming kernel 3.11 tree, and the important ones will show up in the stable kernel 3.10 series soon as well. Kernel 3.9 should be OK as well, but some patches might be missing. With kernel 3.11 (and 3.10.5 or higher) I expect most instability issues from the past to be gone. There might still be minor issues with userspace segfaults (due to cache issues), but they are rare.... Looking back, the main problems of instability and kernel crashes in the past were assumely due to a) cache and TLB flushing were unreliable, b) kernel stack overflows (because of sudden irq processing which used too much stack), and c) miscompiled code in pa_memcpy() because of C-code which is not valid C... Testing on my machines showed, that the kernels 3.10.x and 3.11 will boot in UP and SMP mode on nearly all machines. Most notably, we now have support for the C8000 workstation, for which serial ports and framebuffer mode with FireGL cards should work (Thank you Thomas!). Even a patch for the BMC in the C8000 will probably be included latest with kernel 3.12. Debian: We have our own debian package repository at http://ftp.parisc-linux.org/debian-ports/ which currently holds more than 8300 pre-built debian packages (Thank you Dave!!!). Even pre-built debian 3.10 kernel images are now available there. We don't yet have a real debian-installation media yet. I've prepared a bootable image and some instructions on how to install debian-unstable from our repository, but you should only try this if you are a linux/parisc expert. Brave people will find those instructions here: http://wiki.parisc-linux.org/Debian_Ports_Installation For all others I'd suggest to wait until we have the debian-installer finished, which is still one of my top-priorities. Furthermore, we sadly still don't have buildd-server. What really is missing here is someone who is willing to host a parisc server and provide enough direct bandwith to the internet. Giving away real server hardware is probably doable (and those parisc machines luckily aren't expensive any longer on ebay :-)) and even administration would be done by Dave, me or someone else if necessary. On the other side, Dave has the buildd/wanna-build software installed on his machine. The wanna-build software needs a custom trigger script to handle running on a non local machine. It is needed to populate the source and packages database. Maybe, somebody has already done this and may give him a hint? Gentoo: If you don't want to wait for debian, I'd suggest that you try Gentoo instead. For instructions please see their website at http://www.gentoo.org/main/en/where.xml (architecture hppa). PARISC website: Our current parisc website at http://www.parisc-linux.org is still based on CVS, and it's sometimes unreliable (means: sometimes it's not reachable). To solve this issue my plan is to migrate it's content in september to the wiki at kernel.org: https://parisc.wiki.kernel.org/ If someone is interested in doing that - and maybe has some interest and knowledge in how nice web sites should look like, please let me know! TODO: There is still much on my todo list, most importantly - keep pushing kernel patches upstream (https://patchwork.kernel.org/project/linux-parisc/list/) - build a debian-installer ISO, and - migrate the website. For all other things I keep a personal TODO-list at http://wiki.parisc-linux.org/TODO. Again, volunteers for some of those topics are always welcome! Last but not least I want to say a thank-you to all people who have contributed to this project during the last weeks. The following list of people is taken purely from the kernel git tree and shows those who have directly or indirectly contributed to parisc kernel source tree. Same thank-you goes of course to all other here unnamed people who have tested stuff, reported issues, fixed userspace or kept on the discussion. THANK YOU! Helge List of contributors to the kernel tree: ---------------------------------------- Alex Ivanov Al Viro Bill Pemberton Bjorn Helgaas Chen Gang Cong Wang Damian Hobson-Garcia David Howells Frederic Weisbecker Geert Uytterhoeven Guy Martin Helge Deller H. Peter Anvin James Bottomley Jiang Liu Jiri Slaby Joe Perches John David Anglin John Stultz Julia Lawall Kautuk Consul Kees Cook Kyle McMartin Larry Finger Mathias Krause Matt Fleming Michael S. Tsirkin Michel Lespinasse Mike Frysinger Myron Stowe Nikitas Angelinas Paul Bolle Paul Gortmaker Peter Huewe Peter Zijlstra Rolf Eike Beer Srivatsa S. Bhat Thomas Bogendoerfer Thomas Gleixner Torben Hohn Wei Yongjun Will Deacon Yinghai Lu Yong Zhang Zhao Hongjiang -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-parisc" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
