Gentoo on m68k

Stanley_Johnson · n00b Joined: 15 Aug 2019 Posts: 9

Hello,

I'm trying to install Gentoo on a Centris 650 with 136 MB, but it appears that Gentoo doesn't have a current unsupported port for m68k.

I found "stage3-m68k-20130509.tar.bz2" on multiple mirrors (with a June 16, 2013 creation date), but nothing more recent than that. So I figured I would just start with that Stage 3 and update as per the Gentoo Handbook.

Starting with a stable Debian sid installation (with sysvinit), I restored the Stage 3 tar file to a blank partition mounted at /mnt/gentoo, then followed (for the most part) the instructions in the Gentoo Handbook; see below. The issue seems to be that python and portage from 2013 seem to be too old, and I'm not sure how to get around the EAPI issue.

An alternative might be to start with Stage 1 for m68k, and I don't see a Stage 1 tar file posted anywhere.

Thanks for any suggestions.

-Stan

fedeliallalinea · Posted: Fri Aug 16, 2019 2:29 pm Post subject:

This happens because portage is too old, try to unpack portage-2.3.69.tar.bz2 in /root and then run /root/portage-2.3.69/bin/emerge -1 portage, if portage install and run correctly remove /root/portage-2.3.69 directory
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Stanley_Johnson · n00b Joined: 15 Aug 2019 Posts: 9

Thanks for your reply. I see this:

fedeliallalinea · Posted: Fri Aug 16, 2019 4:20 pm Post subject:

What you have in your /etc/portage/make.conf? Your /usr/portage is populate?
It's only a test because this snapshot is really old, try to create file /etc/portage/repos.conf/gentoo.conf and put

Stanley_Johnson · n00b Joined: 15 Aug 2019 Posts: 9

Thanks. Do you know whether there is a later Stage 3 for m68k? Alternately, I could compile everything from scratch (probably using an emulator on a faster system), but I don't know how to create a Stage 1 for m68k.

Everything I have so far is the default for this Stage 3. With your suggested changes, I see this:

fedeliallalinea · Posted: Fri Aug 16, 2019 5:23 pm Post subject:

Chewi · Posted: Fri Aug 16, 2019 10:05 pm Post subject:

Hello, fellow crazy person!! :lol:

Another dev alerted me to your plight and being probably the only person who has installed Gentoo on m68k in the last 5 years, I'd like to help. I actually installed it on an Amiga 1200 just this February. I had hoped to show it off at a work conference but I didn't get enough votes, though I may still show it to a smaller crowd when I get the time to finish preparing.

One really silly thing I did was run Windows for Workgroups 3.11 under DOSBox.

No really. Unfortunately the Amiga's oddball planar graphics chip means that it can't really do anything graphical under Linux. You get a framebuffer but X, SDL, and Wayland are all incompatible. There is an alternative X server that should work but all I got was a white screen. Apparently it's unusably slow anyway. So what did I do? Well there was nothing to stop me from running an Xvnc server instead and that made DOSBox possible. Windows must have taken about 30 minutes just to start and moving the mouse was like shifting a boulder but it did get as far as starting Solitaire before I gave up. :wink:

How did I do it? Well I'm Gentoo's cross-compiling guy and I have a project called cross-boss that cross-compiles new Gentoo systems from scratch rather than using a stage tarball. Unfortunately it's been under a very heavy overhaul for far too long while I've become a dev and made important changes to Gentoo itself. It's not ready for public consumption but it does still get me going when I need it to.

I had hoped to create a new stage3 somehow but I moved onto other things. Catalyst doesn't support cross-compiling though and the Amiga is nowhere near capable of building it all by itself. Plan A was to use FS-UAE. It actually does work now but the networking code, which relies on QEMU, is totally broken. Plan B was probably to use ARAnyM, which I've heard should work but I've never tried it before. Plan C was to use QEMU directly but I haven't had much luck running Portage under it in recent years. Plan D was distcc but I'm doubtful that would even work, at least in any sensible timeframe.

Failing all that, I can just give you what cross-boss created although I've installed a bunch of things on top. Even without the extras, I don't quite consider what cross-boss produces to be "release" quality, which is why I haven't promoted it for building official stages. If you're happy with this solution then I can give you something now, otherwise you'll have to wait a while. It was built for the 68030 but I gather your system has a 68040 so you should be okay.

Stanley_Johnson · n00b Joined: 15 Aug 2019 Posts: 9

Is there anyone out there running a current version of Gentoo on m68k (mac68k)? I have not been able to resolve this issue. The stage 3 from 2013 does not allow any updates or current packages because portage and python are too old. Portage is sys-apps/portage-2.1.11.62. There are two versions of python: dev-lang/python-2.7.3-r2 and dev-lang/python-3.2.3.

Perhaps there is a way to "fool" emerge and force the install of later versions of python and portage?

If not, are there detailed instructions somewhere on how to create a stage 1 tarball from the 2013 stage 3, or maybe from a different distribution, such as Debian SID, if a current toolchain is needed? And then instructions on how to proceed from the stage 1 to stage 3?

thanks

Chewi · Posted: Fri Aug 30, 2019 10:31 am Post subject:

Stanley_Johnson · n00b Joined: 15 Aug 2019 Posts: 9

Thanks for your response. I did see it, and I'm sorry I did not respond. If you are able to provide a more current stage 3, or a stage 3 with modifications, that would be great.

Chewi · Posted: Tue Sep 10, 2019 10:23 pm Post subject:

Sorry for the delay, I was trying to get around to bumping and trying ARAnyM but things kept jumping in front. Here's my system as it stands.

Stanley_Johnson · n00b Joined: 15 Aug 2019 Posts: 9

Thanks, though in the interim I believe I have solved the problem. Through an iterative process of first installing earlier versions of packages and dealing with a few circular dependencies, I now have a current Gentoo system on m68k. The only thing I had to do outside of emerge was to first install an older version of python, but I was able to overwrite that later by installing the same version using emerge. My next step will be to learn how to emerge packages into an empty filesystem. I already have a list of packages from the 2013 stage 3 tar file, but if anyone has experience in creating a new stage 3 tar file from an existing up-to-date installation, please let me know. I know I can't just create a tar file of my current system, since I installed many extra things (such as telnet and ftp) that are useful to me on an old m68k system but might not be suitable for a default stage 3.

NeddySeagoon · Posted: Mon Sep 16, 2019 7:11 pm Post subject:

Stanley_Johnson,

Tony0945 · Posted: Mon Sep 16, 2019 7:45 pm Post subject:

NeddySeagoon · Posted: Mon Sep 16, 2019 8:00 pm Post subject:

Tony0945,

That works.
Its not perfect but it mostly works.

That link is for arm64. Adjust to suit if you need a different CPU.
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NeddySeagoon

Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail.

fthain · n00b Joined: 10 Apr 2020 Posts: 6

Hi Stan,

The stage3-m68k-20130509.tar.bz2 from gentoo.org works fine, but as you
discovered, the included Portage release is obsolete and doesn't support
modern ebuilds (it fails with "The current version of portage supports
EAPI '5'"). Also, the included Python release is too old to support modern
Portage and the included GCC release is too old for current Glibc.

You can install some more recent versions of Portage and Python using old
ebuilds from git.gentoo.org. These upgrades and the others may bring some
complications described in /usr/portage/metadata/news.

Once you've updated Python and Portage, you'll find that the @system set
is not installable. Certain @system set packages have dependencies which
lack the ~m68k keyword. Those packages need to be listed in
/etc/portage/package.accept_keywords.

Then there's the problem that some @system set packages fail to build.
E.g. some packages omit -lrt from linker flags but glibc 2.15 has
clock_gettime() in librt.so. Other packages fail to build for other
reasons.

Many issues have been fixed upstream and disappear once the entire system
has been brought up to date. Some package upgrades are currently buggy
(nano, groff) and have to be masked. Some packages in the m68k profile
aren't appropriate on this hardware (systemd, udev) and can be safely
masked. The same can be said for some USE flags.

Having found workarounds for all of the above problems, I was able to use the
up-to-date system as a (stage4) seed and was eventually able to get
Catalyst to produce a new stage3.

The new stage3 was then used as a new seed to build another stage3, to
upgrade to gcc 9.3 and to demonstrate that the system can rebuild itself.
The portage tree was then updated to 2020-04-09 and another stage3 was
generated. You can download the result from
https://sourceforge.net/projects/linux-mac68k/files/Gentoo%20m68k%20unauthorized/

For these Catalyst builds I had to modify the portage tree snapshot. The
modifications can be found in /root/portage-snapshot-20200409.diff in the
stage3 tar linked above. This patch will probably become redundant by the
time the libxcrypt transition takes place. Until then, it's useful if you
want to rebuild system packages.

All of these builds were done with catalyst-3.0.9 in a qemu-system-m68k
guest with 1 GB of RAM. (Catalyst-3.0.8 didn't work because it wants to
build everything in a tmpfs that is too small for building gcc.)

This stage3 is just a proof of concept. I'm not planning to support or update
this build. YMMV.

Chewi · Posted: Mon Apr 13, 2020 8:41 am Post subject:

Sorry you've had to go through all that without any official new stages from me. Too many things going on. I did bump ARAnyM a while back though and it's fantastic. It supports some VirtIO drivers available in the kernel so networking just works. My kernel had been configured for Amiga hardware so I also had to enable some Atari video and input options. I was able to boot my existing system entirely over NFS with ease. It seems pretty fast and I think it would be interesting to benchmark it against QEMU.

fthain · n00b Joined: 10 Apr 2020 Posts: 6

> Sorry you've had to go through all that without any official new stages
> from me. Too many things going on.

I know what it's like; the upstream Linux/m68k port has a shortage of volunteers too.
There's no need to apologise. Rather, let me thank you for
stage3-m68k-20130509.tar.bz2

> I did bump ARAnyM a while back though and it's fantastic. It supports
> some VirtIO drivers available in the kernel so networking just works. My
> kernel had been configured for Amiga hardware so I also had to enable
> some Atari video and input options. I was able to boot my existing
> system entirely over NFS with ease.

The kernel build I put on sourceforge is also capable of booting from an NFS rootfs.
https://sourceforge.net/projects/linux-mac68k/files/
For example,

qemu-system-m68k -M q800 -m 1004M -serial none -serial mon:stdio -g 800x600x4 -append "console=tty0 console=ttyS0 root=/dev/nfs ip=192.168.65.11:::::eth0:none nfsroot=192.168.65.1:/export/gentoo-m68k" -kernel vmlinux-4.14.176-mac-backport+ -net nic,model=dp83932,addr=00:00:00:01:02:03 -net bridge -rtc base=localtime

> It seems pretty fast and I think it would be interesting to benchmark it against QEMU.

Yes. Compared to Aranym, I find QEMU's serial console support very convenient.

Chewi · Posted: Wed Apr 15, 2020 9:55 am Post subject:

fthain · n00b Joined: 10 Apr 2020 Posts: 6

I'm happy to see that there's now an official tarball: stage3-m68k-openrc-20210902T151859Z.tar.xz
I had been working on producing a current stage3 myself, because getting to python 3.9 and portage 3.0 from last year's stage3 is a nightmare. So, "thank you" to those responsible for producing this latest one!

Chewi · Posted: Thu Sep 09, 2021 12:45 pm Post subject:

You're welcome! The whole arch was being threatened with removal, and since the guy who was working on this sadly died, I realised I needed to step up. I built a new stage3 with Catalyst from the system I posted above, and then dilfridge very kindly took this to kickstart automated builds on the official Gentoo infra servers. This should be regularly updated going forwards.

My contribution was helped by the arrival of a new virtual m68k machine type in QEMU 6.0.0. It supports virtio drivers and up to 3GB RAM! The kernel bits haven't been mainlined yet but I've spoken to the author to iron out a couple of bugs. The automated builds will be done with userspace qemu-m68k, and I could have used this too, but using a real m68k kernel gave me more certainty that it would work in practise.

I'm looking at doing more m68k keywording and I'll continue to use qemu-system-m68k for that. I don't yet know whether I'll be able to take the m68k profiles out of experimental status. It may be too much work, and I do tend to see several test failures. Many appear to be number-precision-related, and those can probably be ignored, but others are to do with memory alignment, which is a lot more serious. zstd didn't even start at all, for instance, but thankfully upstream is looking into that, to my pleasant surprise.

CaptainBlood · Advocate Joined: 24 Jan 2010 Posts: 3897

+1
I'd wish not having sold my ST 1024 decades ago, I started ASM with. What a breeze it was.
At the same time, the soft dept boss was lurking on something called minix and mentionned some strange thing called linux just started a anonymous student.
I had no idea was that guy was talking about.

Thks 4 ur attention, interest & support
_________________
USE="-* ..." in /etc/portage/make.conf here, i.e. a countermeasure to portage implicit braces, belt & diaper paradigm
LT: "I've been doing a passable imitation of the Fontana di Trevi, except my medium is mucus. Sooo much mucus. "

Chewi · Posted: Thu Sep 09, 2021 3:29 pm Post subject:

I forgot to add that the virtual m68k QEMU machine is shockingly fast. Thanks to virtio-gpu, I am able to run X using the modesetting driver. The game Abuse runs at a totally playable speed. I fired up Windows for Workgroups 3.11 under DOSBox Staging like I did on my real Amiga, but this time it started really quickly and was very usable... well about as usable as you can expect from early 90s Windows.

CaptainBlood · Advocate Joined: 24 Jan 2010 Posts: 3897

Recalling I went ASM using the same proprietary C software ( GFA C ?) as it would allow ASM inlining.
Quick & dirty googling for C interpreter on linux/gentoo; didn't return anything there. :oops:

That would be nice for C teaching.

Well tuned gcc+gdb+editor(+ddd?) likeky to bring equivalent level of handiness, if not better.
Too lazy to investigate how to properly set.

Maybe someone has an idea for an all in one interpreter?

Thks 4 ur attention, interest & support.
_________________
USE="-* ..." in /etc/portage/make.conf here, i.e. a countermeasure to portage implicit braces, belt & diaper paradigm
LT: "I've been doing a passable imitation of the Fontana di Trevi, except my medium is mucus. Sooo much mucus. "

fthain · n00b Joined: 10 Apr 2020 Posts: 6