Re: testing beyond Intel [PATCH]
On Sat, Mar 20, 2004 at 12:42:51AM -0500, Rick_Thomas wrote:
> Miroslav and/or Sven,
>
> Please see my offer to help (with the same "subject" as this item --
> posted to the debian-boot mailing list).
>
> I would be very grateful If you (or someone else on this list) could
> point me at the chapters and sections of the PowerPC debian-installer
> docs that are most seriously out of date, and give me a few hints as to
> where to look for the raw information that I can turn into the needed
> updates.
Ok.
I believe you are familiar with the way pmacs work, but there are other
powerpc hardware out there. I believe we could start by writing a
working document describing various issues which would be needed in
order to write the real install document later on.
This would contain :
1) description of all powerpc hardware. old world pmac, new world
pmac, prep boxes, non-ibm chrp boxes, IBM RS6000 chrp boxes, pegasos
chrp, those with a powerpc processor, and those with a power3 or
power4/G5 processor. Maybe we can list others, but those are not
currently supported. A hardware table or something listing all known
models would be nice thing also, and a checkbox for those known to
have booted d-i. A, i forgot the apus boxes, naturally. Those are
amigas with a powerpc accelerator card (dual cpu m86k-powerpc).
2) Desciptions of the various partition tables suppported by those (i
guess MBR, Mac partition tables and amiga partition tables cover it),
and of the way they boot (old world : miboot, bootx, quik, of from
serial console, new world : of, yaboot, chrp/prep : yaboot, of, prep
boot partition). A small OF manual, and the peculiarities of the
different individual OF implementations would be welcome. Also, a
third info on this level would be the type of kernels used for booting
(pmac : pure vmlinux for yaboot, .coff for OF booting. chrp, chrp-rs6k
and prep/simple vmlinuz for those respective boxes) also a mention of
builtin initrd would be nice.
3) Maybe some info about : booting from disk, booting (autobooting)
from cdrom, and netbooting.
4) maybe some links for relevant projects or web sites for each of
those topics.
I think this is the essential info concerning the ppc specific stuff in
the installation manual. Once we have a clear view of those, we can
easily take info from this document and integrate it in the relevant
parts of the installation manual.
I have learned many of the above the hard way, so i could help you get
that info, and also connect you with the people who own said hardware
and are interested in debian directly.
Notice that this first document could also be used by the powerpc d-i
porters, or even other interested in this. It could even become material
for a presentation in some linux forum or something such ? Especially if
we add a section about other linux distros working on powerpc.
> I am a competent technical writer and a native speaker of English with a
> long background in UNIX, but I am just beginning with Debian Linux
> (Having mostly used RedHat and/or Yellowdog in the past). Please
> forgive me if I ask what seem like stupid questions while I'm learning
> to do things the "Debian way".
>
> I can read code or changelogs, if that's the only way to figure out
> what's going on, but design documents or programmer's notes will be the
> most directly helpful.
>
> Also remember that I have only about an hour a day that I can afford to
> give to this project, so progress may not be rapid -- especially while
> I'm still learning where things are and how they work.
No problem, i will help you as best i can on this, altough i am mostly
using my time in the technical issues.
Friendly,
Sven Luther
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