Could EHEA driver be included on powerpc64 installer?
I encountered the problem that the EHEA driver isn't included on the
installer when installing squeeze (powerpc64) on an IBM p520 power6+
machine. Using a USB stick to transfer the file after extracting it
from the linux-image pacakge worked fine of course but is less convinient.
The only other problem is that there is no working boot loader yet and the
installer has no clue how to actually boot the machine. At the moment,
installing grub2 actually does work, with a slight bit of manual work.
The requirement is to use a very recent grub2 (which I believe is now
in fact the case in squeeze), and then create a small (8MB is plenty)
partition of type PReP boot. /boot obviously has to be on some
filesystem supported by grub2, although that should not be a concern
in most cases. grub-install does NOT work since it doesn't understand
the IBM machine either. Copying the /usr/lib/grub/powerpc-ieee1275/
to /boor/grub manually, and then using grub-image to manually create
a powerpc-ieee1275 image as /boot/grub/grub.img works fine (a number
of patches have gone in recently that seem to fix issues with mdraid
and such). It is also required to tell grub-image that the prefix
has to be set to (hd0)/boot/grub or similar, depending on the grub
device name the grub files are on, and the path. In my case I have
(md/0)/boot/grub since I am using md raid1 with the new 1.x superblock.
The image is then copied to the PReP boot partition using dd (so dd
if=/boot/grub/grub.img of=/dev/sda1 (and sdb1) in my case). grub also
requires devaliases in openfirmware at this time (hopefully someone fixes
that at some point), which IBM machines don't automatically make, unlike
every other openfirmware system. So manually creating hd0 and hd1 aliases
using 'nvalias' in openfirmware for the two disks in my case was required.
After that grub sees the disks, and detects that mdraid, and just works.
Of course the initial installer boots fine from CD, other than of course
needing 'video=ofonly' passed to install64.
So if ehea.ko was included on the installer, it is currently possible
to manually setup the boot partition and install grub2 and get squeeze
running on an IBM powerpc server. Getting grub2 to support it in
grub-install would be great, but needs work, and the installer could
of course gain knowledge of the boot partition type needed as well,
and grub2 could learn to not require devaliases in the openfirmware,
but it does work.
yaboot simply isn't an option, since the version that does work on the
IBM hasn't been packaged yet (it was released years ago), but also yaboot
has no clue about md raid or modern linux filesystems, or anything else
decent one might want to use. grub2 is clearly better there, and is so
close to ready for use that yaboot serves no purpose anymore.
--
Len Sorensen
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