Re: OldWorld Mac-specific problems; perhaps drop?
On Wed, Jul 12, 2006 at 06:31:39PM +0200, Holger Levsen wrote:
> Hi,
>
> On Tuesday 11 July 2006 12:48, Sven Luther wrote:
> > > dfsg-free means to boot the installer on old world, the fact that the
> > > only method available for sarge no longer works (BootX; which can't be
> > > used on new world machiens) with 2.6.16 kernels, and that the 2.6.16+
> > > kernels fail to boot on old world macs
>
> You filed this as #377152 - but there is also netbooting, which might have
> problems on oldworld because of the size of the initrd, see #307232:
>
> Netbooting d-i doesnt work as well. At least for the OF 1.0.5 of my 7200 the
> 5.2mb initrd is too big, it works with a smaller (1.2 mb) kernels. According
> to ethereal it hangs after 8169 packets, each 588 bytes in size. This is
> roughly 4mb.
Indeed, but we had the same for the pegasos, and i created a -small image
extra for that in the sarge days. You can make the image much smaller, if you
remove the language pack for example.
Now, 2.6.16 may be able to help here, if you set load-base accorduiongly, at
lesst it did for elf/pegasos 1, since the 2.6.16 kernel is compiled with
-fPIC, and thus not relocated to 4 or 8 MB and thus overwriting the firmware.
I am not sure how the oldworld firmware react about this though.
> I have no idea where the limit in other machines with a different version of
> OF is - but I would not be surprised to find higher limits. The 7200 is a
> fairly old oldworld modell...
Ok.
> I have not looked into this again myself yet, as I first "concentrated" on
> miboot-floppies...
Hehe, the right thing to do. Please join the debootloader alioth project, who
is working on maintaining many bootloader packages, among them yaboot, miboot
and emile. There is some bootsector code in emile which should free miboot.
> > The official method of booting oldworld powermacs is using the miboot
> > floppies, and altough miboot is currently non-free, work is under way to
> > free it, and there are other people here who are working on bettering the
> > floppies, please participate to that effort or something.
>
> Also there is support for floppy booting in quik, it just doesn't work at the
> moment. But IMHO there is a realistic chance to make this work so we can have
> it in RC1 or 2.
Well, maybe, but floppy booting in quick is something we have been hearing
about since a couple of years, and still doesn't quite work. I see more
momentum behind miboot right now.
> But even using the current miboot-floppies is not the end of the world... it's
> just non-free :(
But being liberated ...
> > There are rumors that you can use also a .coff kernel+ramdisk and use that
> > one to boot those boxes, which would be gully free, but nobody ever
> > investigated this.
>
> I dont parse this completly. Which method would this be?
The netbooting one i think, for which you need the .coff kernel, no ?
> > So what would you gain by dropping support ?
>
> Thats exactly the question :)
:)
Friendly,
Sven Luther
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