Hi!
(Forgive me if this is well-answered somewhere, but I did some
searching, and did not come upon it.)

I have a Netra T1 running the old Debian sparc port. I wanted to
reinstall it with the sparc64 port, but it does not have a cdrom, and
I do not seem to grasp how to netboot the Debian installer for this
machine.

I tried just handing it vmlinux from https://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/ports/debian-installer/2021-04-17/sparc64/debian-installer-images_20210415_sparc64.tar.gz
over TFTP, but that just dies with "fast Data Access MMU Miss" before
ever displaying anything suggesting Linux was booting, so that seems
wrong.

I tried setting up GRUB using the config examples on the wiki, but
instead hanging it the vmlinux and initrd.img from the above
debian-installer tarball, but it just bails out into grub rescue after
printing "error: no DNS servers configured." (and I'm quite confident
my DHCP server is giving out DNS servers too), so I presume something
is going very wrong.

Any pointers or helpful hints would be welcomed.

Thanks!
- Rich

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Hello Rich!

On 5/9/21 3:24 PM, Rich wrote:

I tried just handing it vmlinux from https://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/ports/debian-installer/2021-04-17/sparc64/debian-installer-images_20210415_sparc64.tar.gz
over TFTP, but that just dies with "fast Data Access MMU Miss" before
ever displaying anything suggesting Linux was booting, so that seems
wrong.

netboot installers are part of the debian-installer tarball found here [1].

Please try with that one and report back. netboot is currently untested.

Adrian

[1] https://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/ports/debian-installer/2021-04-17/sparc64/

--
.''`. John Paul Adrian Glaubitz
: :' : Debian Developer - glaubitz@debian.org
`. `' Freie Universitaet Berlin - glaubitz@physik.fu-berlin.de
`- GPG: 62FF 8A75 84E0 2956 9546 0006 7426 3B37 F5B5 F913

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
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bHi Adrian!

On Sun, May 9, 2021 at 9:26 AM John Paul Adrian Glaubitz <glaubitz@physik.fu-berlin.de> wrote:

Hello Rich!

On 5/9/21 3:24 PM, Rich wrote:

I tried just handing it vmlinux from https://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/ports/debian-installer/2021-04-17/sparc64/debian-installer-images_20210415_sparc64.tar.gz
over TFTP, but that just dies with "fast Data Access MMU Miss" before
ever displaying anything suggesting Linux was booting, so that seems
wrong.

netboot installers are part of the debian-installer tarball found here [1].

Please try with that one and report back. netboot is currently untested.

You know, you say they're part of it, but I checked one from 2019 and
that one...

drwxr-xr-x root/root 0 2021-04-14 18:06 ./
drwxr-xr-x root/root 0 2021-04-14 18:06 ./installer-sparc64/
drwxr-xr-x root/root 0 2021-04-14 18:06 ./installer-sparc64/20210415/ drwxr-xr-x root/root 0 2021-04-14 18:06 ./installer-sparc64/20210415/images/
-rw-r--r-- root/root 379 2021-04-14 18:06 ./installer-sparc64/20210415/images/MANIFEST
-rw-r--r-- root/root 8923 2021-04-14 18:06 ./installer-sparc64/20210415/images/MANIFEST.udebs
-rw-r--r-- root/root 576 2021-04-14 18:06 ./installer-sparc64/20210415/images/MD5SUMS
-rw-r--r-- root/root 972 2021-04-14 18:06 ./installer-sparc64/20210415/images/SHA256SUMS
drwxr-xr-x root/root 0 2021-04-14 18:06 ./installer-sparc64/20210415/images/cdrom/
-rw-r--r-- root/root 1056231 2021-04-14 18:06 ./installer-sparc64/20210415/images/cdrom/debian-cd_info.tar.gz
-rw-r--r-- root/root 18225780 2021-04-14 18:06 ./installer-sparc64/20210415/images/cdrom/initrd.gz
-rw-r--r-- root/root 16342832 2021-04-14 18:06 ./installer-sparc64/20210415/images/cdrom/vmlinux
drwxr-xr-x root/root 0 2021-04-14 18:06 ./installer-sparc64/20210415/images/netboot/
drwxr-xr-x root/root 0 2021-04-14 18:06 ./installer-sparc64/20210415/images/netboot/debian-installer/
drwxr-xr-x root/root 0 2021-04-14 18:06 ./installer-sparc64/20210415/images/netboot/debian-installer/sparc64/ -rw-r--r-- root/root 16594288 2021-04-14 18:06 ./installer-sparc64/20210415/images/netboot/debian-installer/sparc64/initrd.gz -rw-r--r-- root/root 16342832 2021-04-14 18:06 ./installer-sparc64/20210415/images/netboot/debian-installer/sparc64/vmlinux -rw-r--r-- root/root 43292672 2021-04-14 18:06 ./installer-sparc64/20210415/images/netboot/mini.iso
-rw-r--r-- root/root 22716904 2021-04-14 18:06 ./installer-sparc64/20210415/images/netboot/netboot.tar.gz
-rw-r--r-- root/root 3405 2021-04-14 18:06 ./installer-sparc64/20210415/images/udeb.list
lrwxrwxrwx root/root 0 2021-04-14 18:06
./installer-sparc64/current -> 20210415

netboot.tar.gz just contains the initrd.gz and vmlinux again:
$ tar tvf netboot.tar.gz
drwxr-xr-x root/root 0 2021-04-14 18:06 ./
drwxr-xr-x root/root 0 2021-04-14 18:06 ./debian-installer/
drwxr-xr-x root/root 0 2021-04-14 18:06 ./debian-installer/sparc64/ -rw-r--r-- root/root 16594288 2021-04-14 18:06 ./debian-installer/sparc64/initrd.gz
-rw-r--r-- root/root 16342832 2021-04-14 18:06 ./debian-installer/sparc64/vmlinux
-rw-r--r-- root/root 57 2021-04-14 18:06 ./version.info

So which installer image, precisely, would you like me to use?

- Rich

Adrian

[1] https://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/ports/debian-installer/2021-04-17/sparc64/

--
.''`. John Paul Adrian Glaubitz
: :' : Debian Developer - glaubitz@debian.org
`. `' Freie Universitaet Berlin - glaubitz@physik.fu-berlin.de
`- GPG: 62FF 8A75 84E0 2956 9546 0006 7426 3B37 F5B5 F913

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
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Hello Rich,

On 5/9/21 3:24 PM, Rich wrote:

I tried just handing it vmlinux from https://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/ports/debian-installer/2021-04-17/sparc64/debian-installer-images_20210415_sparc64.tar.gz
over TFTP, but that just dies with "fast Data Access MMU Miss" before ever displaying anything suggesting Linux was booting, so that seems wrong.

just looked into my old docu: I was using "boot net:dhcp -p" at prom level
to get early kernel messages. And AFAIR, vmlinuz and initrd were combined into one file at that time.

netboot installers are part of the debian-installer tarball found here [1].

Please try with that one and report back. netboot is currently untested.

I always wanted to test that, but unfortunately I have no time to setup
an test in the near future.

Good luck and greetings
Hermann

--
Administration/Zentrale Dienste, Interdiziplinaeres
Zentrum fuer wissenschaftliches Rechnen der Universitaet Heidelberg
IWR; INF 205; 69120 Heidelberg; Tel: (06221)54-14405 Fax: -14427
Email: Hermann.Lauer@iwr.uni-heidelberg.de

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