Bug#375208: ppc oldworld miboot-floppies daily-build status

[Sven Luther <sven.luther@wanadoo.fr>]

On Sat, Jun 24, 2006 at 03:02:27PM +0200, Holger Levsen wrote:
> The etch floppies from 
> http://ftp.nl.debian.org/debian/dists/testing/main/installer-powerpc/beta2/images/
> didnt work (boot-floppy didn't boot), I guess because they are build without 
> the non-free miboot tool. It would be nice, if for beta3 we could point 
> people to working images. (Which I haven't found for beta2.)

My opinion on this, would be to not build the boot.img images, and have a
README in place explaining how to build it oneself, and provide the vmlinux
kernel, which is the one used by miboot to put on the floppy, if i remember
well.

The code is :

$(TEMP_KERNEL).gz: $(TEMP_KERNEL)
        #mkvmlinuz -a miboot -r $(KERNELVERSION) -k $(TEMP_KERNEL) -n -d $(TEMP)/lib -o $(TEMP_KERNEL).gz
        # Let's do it the good old fashioned way.
        gzip -c -9 $(TEMP_KERNEL) >$(TEMP_KERNEL).gz

$(TEMP_BOOT).new: $(TEMP_KERNEL).gz
        dd if=/dev/zero of=$@ bs=1024 count=$(FLOPPY_SIZE)
        hformat -l $(DISK_LABEL) $@
        # miboot it not in the archive yet, but it makes no sense to build the
        # floppies when it is not, and cause a support nightmare, so better
        # not build boot and boot-ofonly for official debian-installer.
        echo DOING MIBOOT; \
        echo device $(TEMP_BOOT).new > $(TEMP)/miboot.conf; \
        echo kernel $(TEMP_KERNEL).gz $(KERNEL_CMDL) >> $(TEMP)/miboot.conf; \
        miboot -c $(TEMP)/miboot.conf;                  \
        echo MIBOOT DONE;

So, you see, the steps to create a miboot floppy from a given vmlinux kernel
are :

  1) have miboot .deb installed.
  2) gzip -c -9 vmlinux vmlinux.gz
  3) dd if=/dev/zero of=boot.img bs=1024 count=1440
  4) echo device boot.img >/tmp/miboot.conf
  5) echo kernel vmlinux.gz $KERNEL_CMDL >>/tmp/miboot.conf
  6) miboot -c /tmp/miboot.conf

Where KERNEL_CMDL is :

  root=0200 load_ramdisk=1 prompt_ramdisk=1 devfs=mount debconf/priority=medium

with video=ofonly added for the ofonly version.

It should be rather trivial to write a simple script which does this, or maybe
even add it to the miboot package, or whatever, and provide this in lieu of
the root*.img files.

Holger, what do you think of this proposal ? 

This way, there will be no confusion over the missing non-free miboot, and
users can know what they expect.

miboot.deb is at :

  http://people.debian.org/~luther/miboot

Friendly,

Sven Luther