The number of Debian/SPARC64 users doubled overnight

That's right, I've upgraded my virtual wheezy image to Debian/sparc64 Sid. So I'm the second user who has installed and run Debian popularity contest:

Don't know who is the first user, and don't know why the submission on ~ 29.04.2014 on the graph above hasn't doubled the number of users back then.

Update: Debian/SPARC64 is mostly working, but there are some caveats:
Link time optimization with "gold" linker produces broken binaries. Unfortunately this hits systemd and udev, so those have to be re-built manually. I've submitted a bug for the upstream binutils.

In the mean time if anyone needs a working systemd-udevd, you can ask me. There is also a report that the qt build is broken, but I don't use it - only need a working console.

IOMMU support in upstream qemu-system-sparc64

I didn't write about SPARC emulation lately because I didn't work on it. But Mark Cave-Ayland is still working hard, so there is a lot of new stuff. The sun4m emulation has a new graphic adapter: cg3. Also the old adapter (tcx) supports acceleration.

And now, something really cool for the sun4u emulation. As of today git master has a working IOMMU support in qemu-system-sparc64! This means that you don't need to follow all the steps in
Debian/sparc64 Wheezy under QEMU How-To. Just insert your image into -cdrom and voilà!
Well done, Mark!

Now, while using an IDE drive simplifies the installation process a lot, using virtio still makes sense. Quick performance test:

root@debian-wheezy:~#  dd if=/dev/vdb of=/dev/null bs=1024k count=100
100+0 records in
100+0 records out
104857600 bytes (105 MB) copied, 1.56761 s, 66.9 MB/s

root@debian-wheezy:~#  dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/null bs=1024k count=100
100+0 records in
100+0 records out
104857600 bytes (105 MB) copied, 9.59107 s, 10.9 MB/s


Yes, IDE is slower, as the emulated kernel has to do more work, but still, the performance is pretty much ok.


Also, not every OS running on sun4u machines has support for virtio. From an undisclosed source I know that Mark is working on booting NetBSD/sparc64 under vanilla QEMU. Stay tuned. ;-)

Debian/sparc64 Wheezy under QEMU How-To

The steps to install Debian Wheezy RC1 / SPARC64 under QEMU.

Since the installation process is not obvious for the current QEMU and Debian versions, I gathered this How-To. Feel free to send any feedback.