Re: Success!! [was: BootX & Booting without keyboard/monitor]
Ethan Benson:
>
> > .... BenH has been talking about throwing away quik's second
> > stage code and making yaboot compatible with Oldworld OF and quik's
> > first stage. this way there would effectivly be only one codebase for
> > both oldworld and newworld bootloaders. only the installer and first
> > stage loader would be different.
> >
> > for oldworld quik's first stage powerpc asm bootblock would be used,
> > and its bootblock installer /sbin/quik would be used to save a
> > blocklist of the elfextracted yaboot.b.
> >
> > on newworld you would of course use ybin and its Forth first stage
> > loader installed onto a dedicated bootstrap partition.
> >
> > again i reiterate porting yaboot to oldworld will not make oldworld
> > magically as easy to OF boot as a newworld. Oldworld OF is pure crap
> > and any peice of software is going to have a helluva time functioning
> > correctly on it. some of those machines can't even read from the hard
> > disk which you have to fix before the bootloader even enters into it
> > (since OF must read the disk to load the bootloader).
> >
> > BenH myself and a few others are interested in getting OF booting
> > cleaned up more because simply put, BootX/miboot are kludges. period,
> > macos based booting is fundementally flawed and it would be good for
> > all concerned if that would just go away.
> >
> > ...we need to get him a NuBus/PDS video card which works with current
> > kernels
> > or an Apple HDI-45 video adapter cable.
>
On Sun, May 13, 2001 at 05:11:48PM -0400, basicprinting@earthlink.net wrote:
> My offer of (an Apple HDI-45 video adapter cable) or (MicroConversions
> 2124NBII 24-bit NuBus Card, AppleDB15 female) still stands.
>
> We desperately need to condense the 50+ ways to boot your DebianPowerMac.
> The current hodgepodge of incomplete and anectdotal reports on the mailing
> list is
> too disjointed to allow someone to author a comprehensive HOWTO.
> It is currently impossible to create one
> without a firm understanding of each unique instance,
> and its current status against the various Debian releases.
> The pool of potential authors is therefore very, very small.
>
> It would be a shame to let someone waste their time pondering & composing
> all the possible
> vagarities of a "kludge" or two when the actual goal is in a different
> paradigm.
>
The problem is there isn't anyone that has worked with all of the various
models with linux.
What we really need is a way to verify each report for which set of
machines.
In some cases there may have been past OF patching, and that needs to be
considered.
If a howto is written, it needs to have specific notes on each tested
model/OF combination.
We'll need to make sure that they've reset their Open Firmware, and start
from a "badblocks -w" disk.
Also, we need to choose a way to test the memory in the machines. Memtest
only works on mlock-able memory, and that may not be acceptable.
Let's start a little verification toolset, and we can get some reliable
results.
Also, /proc/cpuinfo should be included in any reports.
Mike
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