Blog - /Personal

I noticed the following snippet in an email sent to the debian-announce mailing list.

Initially, it seemed like sparc ought to have the easiest time of the four to get requalified. Despite misgivings earlier this year about upstream support, sparc is generally doing well; since the sarge release, two new sparc buildds have been brought on-line. Unfortunately, in the same period two buildds have gone off-line, including vore.debian.org which was the designated porter machine; and conversations with DSA revealed the presence of persistent kernel problems affecting the stability of the remaining buildds. It is taking some time to pin down this problem since it only shows up under load, but the porters are working their way through the bug step by step. In the meantime, even if this bug might not affect all sparc hardware, having it affect all of our build daemons is certainly a showstopper, so sparc will be removed from consideration until we no longer have to worry about OpenOffice builds (or other intensive package builds) crashing the buildd machines.

That explains some strange behavior that I've noticed in our webserver at PLUG. It tends to semi-randomly lock up, and I have to go to the office in order to restart it. Hopefully the Debian porters for SPARC get this problem fixed!