On Wed, Sep 10, 2003 at 05:54:54PM -0400, Jon Portnoy wrote:
> On Wed, Sep 10, 2003 at 02:35:03PM -0600, Daniel Robbins wrote:
> > Hi Everyone,
> > 
> > HP has generously given us a very nice dual-CPU Itanium 2 system with
> > 10GB of RAM on extended loan to allow us to port Gentoo Linux to it. I
> > currently have it set up on my LAN and can give out access to
> > experienced Gentoo developers and possibly some non-developers who might
> > have already begun work on porting Gentoo to IA64.
> 
> Steven Plite (splite-gentoo <at> sigint.cs.purdue.edu) has done quite a bit 
> of work in this area - he's currently in the new dev pipeline.

It wasn't easy getting in either.  I usually take a size 36.

> > There are several people on the Gentoo dev team who are very motivated
> > to get our IA64 rock-solid as soon as we possibly can, so I'd expect our
> > progress on IA64 to move along very very quickly. If you have the time
> > and experience to help in some capacity, please email Seemant Kulleen at
> > seemant <at> gentoo.org and cc me (drobbins <at> gentoo.org) and tell us how you
> > can help.
> > 
> > The machine is currently running Debian. Porting plan is:
> > 
> > 1) port Portage to Debian/IA64
> > 2) use Portage to build an IA64 stage1 in a chroot
> > 3) use Portage to build an IA64 stage3 in a chroot
> > 4) get it to boot
> > 5) convert system over to native Gentoo operation

Did all that.  Was pretty straightforward, even for a Gentoo noob like me.

> > 6) expand support for IA64 throughout the Portage tree

I made enough IA64 ebuilds to have a usable headless system, which was
all my users needed.  Sometime I'll hook up a head and see if X works.

> > 7) release

Don't forget:

8) ...
9) profit!

> > 
> > Best Regards,
> > 
> > Daniel
> 
> Steven Plite mailed me today and said he'd put a working stage1 up on a 
> FTP tonight - hopefully he can drop us a mail about it soon.

My annual late-summer head cold is slowing me down, but the tarball's
finally up:

ftp://ftp.cs.purdue.edu/pub/splite/stage1-ia64-1.4-20030912.tar.bz2

I made a cut-down portage tree with enough ebuilds to satisfy bootstrap.sh,
along with an ia64 profile and a one-line patch to eutils.eclass.  (Just grep
for "ia64" to see the changes.)  Instead of running "emerge sync" in the
stage1 tree, just extract this tarball under usr/portage:

ftp://ftp.cs.purdue.edu/pub/splite/usrportage-ia64-20030912.tar.bz2

Now you too can do a stage2.  At least, it works for me in a chroot on a
Gentoo/IA64 system.  I no longer have a Debian/IA64 system to test it on,
but I can't see why it wouldn't work.

Next I'll work on updating my IA64 ebuilds to match the latest stable x86
versions; my local tree has gotten a bit stale.  Also need to make an elilo
ebuild, which is the only non-emerged bit I still have.

Does anyone have experience making bootable IA64 CDs?  That EFI stuff creeps
me out.

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