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17/04/05

Has got vserver running on a 6 way E4000. The procedure (in excessive detail) was:

Running Debian/SPARC 3.1 (sarge) ~ currently testing, installed:

kernel-source-2.4.27 version 2.4.27-8

kernel-patch-vserver version 1.9.5.3

then:

cd /usr/src

tar -xvj < kernel-source-2.4.27.tar.bz2

export PATCH_THE_KERNEL=yes

cd kernel-source-2.4.27

make-kpkg config menuconfig rootcmd fakeroot revision custom01 added-patches vserver --append-to-version +vserver --initrd binary_arch

(borrow the config file from 2.4.27-2-sparc64-smp)

cd ..

dpkg -i *.deb

reboot

All works fine.

22/04/05

... or so it seemed. A number of problems have arrisen.

Both the Debian 2.4.27 and 2.6.8 kernels build and run with the 1.9.5 patch however the exibit a number of problems:

After some analysis Bertl (via IRC) came to the conclusion that it was likely to be an interfacing problem between 32 bit userland apps and 64 bit kernel space. With some inspired hacking he managed to develop some syscall bindings that work for sparc64 and ppc, given they work when compiled as either 64 or 32 bit binaries this means they should work for sparc32 as well. He also says that the API used for the 2.6 kernels is mostly architecture and word size independant (except for a pointer used in passing filenames when dealing with quotas) and thus the chances of getting it working on 2.6 are much higher - that's where the effort should be (and is) going.

Tried 2.6.11.7-vs2.0-pre1 which seems to have the missing /proc/sys/vservers but is otherwise the same as 2.6.8.

It seems there are two possibilities (assuming that the kernel if functioning correctly - which we have (thus far) no reason to doubt):

1. compile up util-vserver as a 64 bit set of applications. This is really a hack rather than a long term solution as it would be cumbersome to distribute, etc.

2. integrate the new syscalls into util-vserver and it /should/ JFW (modulo the single use of pointers in the interface).

Tried