Re: Why it's so difficult to fix PowerMac booting for good
Hello!
On Sat, 2023-05-27 at 12:05 -0600, Stan Johnson wrote:
> Perhaps GRUB could use whatever yaboot uses to create the
> Apple_Bootstrap partition and bless it with ybin, or was yaboot
> violating Debian license rules with its ybin and use of HFS? Similarly,
> perhaps GRUB could be enabled to boot Mac OS X or Mac OS 9 volumes in
> the same way that yaboot already does.
Yaboot's ybin just calls hattrib which is what we are already doing:
> https://github.com/arnew/yaboot/blob/master/ybin/ybin#L909
> https://salsa.debian.org/installer-team/grub-installer/-/blob/master/grub-installer#L1035
I could switch debian-installer completely to using hfsutils but that
would be rather hacky since then the partitioner wouldn't know about HFS
and would have to format the partition with FAT first, then have grub-installer
reformat the partition with hfsutils.
It would be easier if hfsutils provided standard filesystem commands such
as mkfs.hfs and fsck.hfs as this is what debian-installer expects.
> Either way (GRUB or yaboot), I will continue to have only a very basic
> configuration, with one entry per partition, with the kernel always
> vmlinux (or vmlinuz) and the initrd always initrd.img, with symbolic
> links in /boot on the relevant partitions pointing to the real kernel
> and initrd.img that I want to use. I don't need GRUB to maintain a list
> of all the kernels that I keep in /boot, and this way I have a
> consistent way to use GRUB (and make it work like yaboot) on all
> architectures that support GRUB.
That's fine but the idea of using GRUB is to make the PowerPC port more
aligned with standard Debian so that users don't have to mess with another
bootloader. Also, Yaboot is unmaintained and doesn't work with modern versions
of ext4 and so on.
Adrian
--
.''`. John Paul Adrian Glaubitz
: :' : Debian Developer
`. `' Physicist
`- GPG: 62FF 8A75 84E0 2956 9546 0006 7426 3B37 F5B5 F913
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