[J-core] Bootstrapping Debian for sh3

D. Jeff Dionne Jeff at SE-Instruments.com
Sat Jan 21 12:48:18 EST 2017


That's great!   I think another thing that we really need is a working qemu that accurately models the different CPUs.   That would also make bootstrapping an OS easier...

Cheers,
J.

> On Jan 20, 2017, at 16:32, John Paul Adrian Glaubitz <glaubitz at physik.fu-berlin.de> wrote:
> 
> Hello!
> 
> I'm Debian's main SuperH porter at the moment and I'm in charge of the
> sh4 port we have in Debian. The sh4 was originally maintained by people
> from Renesas or people who were paid by Renesas and they also did the
> original bootstrapping.
> 
> Initially, they worked on sh3 support but later on moved on to support
> sh4 only which is why Debian currently has an sh4 port only which they
> also left abandoned in 2014 when I took it over.
> 
> Since J-Core plans to release a SH-3-compatible design with the J-3
> next, I have started looking into what needs to be done to bootstrap
> Debian on sh3. Since Renesas already did some work on sh3 in packages
> like glibc and gcc, the amount of work needed to get Debian ready for
> an initial sh3 bootstrap can be done within a few days.
> 
> For the bootstrapping itself, I'm relying on the work of Helmut Grohne
> who is another Debian Developer who created a project called rebootstrap
> [1]. Rebootstrap is an effort to improve the bootstrappability of Debian
> to a new architecture. In the past, all bootstrapping had to be done
> manually. With rebootstrap, the process has been mostly automated with
> a few notable exceptions like the perl package which still cannot
> be cross-compiled.
> 
> The bootstrapping process already works so well that Helmut has set up
> a Jenkins job [2] which periodically bootstraps Debian for every possible
> architecture supported by the Debian sources. It even includes things
> like tilegx or nios2 which have not been bootstrapped for Debian yet.
> 
> With all that being said, work to make Debian on sh3 bootstrappable is
> underway and I have already got some patches like linux or glibc
> fixed for sh3. Many additional packages have bug reports opened with
> patches attached to the bug report.
> 
> Now, anyone can actually try rebootstrap themselves. All that is necessary
> is a machine running a not too old release of Debian or Ubuntu with
> an unstable schroot [3] environment configured. After that, bootstrapping
> Debian for sh3 is as simple as running a single command:
> 
>    $ schroot -c sid ./bootstrap.sh HOST_ARCH=sh3
> 
> Since not all packages which need to be patched for sh3 have been updated
> yet, I have added the necessary patches in a custom version of the bootstrap
> script which I uploaded to my Debian webspace [4]. It would, of course, be
> possible to merge all the patches required for sh3 into Helmut's git repository,
> but I rather prefer the patches getting into the packages directly.
> 
> Either way, we should be able to bootstrap Debian for sh3 at the time
> when J3 is available which means people will actually have a decent amount
> of software they can run on their J3 machines. We will just need to set
> up buildd infrastructure for sh3 then so that we can automatically build
> packages for it once an updated source package is uploaded to the FTP
> servers - like it's already being used for sh4.
> 
> The PDF linked in [5] shows the buildd farm consisting of SH7785LCR boards
> like it was used back then for sh4 operated by Nobuhiro Iwamatsu [5].
> Unfortunately, none of these boards is running anymore except for one
> which I luckily obtained from Nobuhiro and which is now running in my
> living room as a buildd. I have a couple of NextVoD boxes lined up which
> will be set up as buildds for sh4 in the future once we have re-added
> ST40 support to the Linux kernel.
> 
> If anyone has questions regarding Debian on SuperH, let me know.
> 
> Cheers,
> Adrian
> 
>> [1] https://wiki.debian.org/HelmutGrohne/rebootstrap
>> [2] https://jenkins.debian.net/view/rebootstrap/
>> [3] https://wiki.debian.org/Schroot
>> [4] https://people.debian.org/~glaubitz/bootstrap-sh3.sh
>> [5] http://oss.renesas.com/Documentations/Debian_SH4.pdf
> 
> -- 
> .''`.  John Paul Adrian Glaubitz
> : :' :  Debian Developer - glaubitz at debian.org
> `. `'   Freie Universitaet Berlin - glaubitz at physik.fu-berlin.de
>  `-    GPG: 62FF 8A75 84E0 2956 9546  0006 7426 3B37 F5B5 F913
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