Re: RFC: What should be done about kernel-image's bootloader questions
On Mon, Jun 04, 2001 at 04:01:53AM -0800, Ethan Benson wrote:
> NewWorld powermacs all lack floppy drives so it would seem logical to
> simply default to do_bootfloppy = False if the machine is a NewWorld
> powermac.
I'll agree with that.
> however its impossible to really make a very useful bootfloppy on
> powermac in general, for oldworld we can copy the .coff kernel to a
> floppy which might be manually bootable via OF, but thats about it. i
> don't know about other powerpc subarchs.
If the image has the 'vmlinux.coff' file it really should outta work on
OldWorld from OF. On 'PReP' the zImage (arch/ppc/boot/images/zImage.prep
in 2.4.5+) always and must work. There really isn't a choice of bootloaders,
so it's zImage or squat, more or less. This also works fine from a floppy
drive and I _think_ you can assume 9 times out of 10 you'll have a floppy
drive too. For CHRP, yaboot can work, but at least on LongTrail it probably
isn't (at least here, but I didn't test too well).
> I would like to hear what people thing the kernel-image packages
> should do on non-OldWorld PowerMacs as far as bootloader setup, and
> boot-floppy creation. at that point filing a bug against
> kernel-package asking for the changes will be done.
If we're new world pmac, ask does your yaboot.conf refernce /vmlinux or another
symlink. If no, offer them a chance to edit their conf file? Or, we can do
what x86 does with lilo (or appears to do) is just make sure that their config
file looks valid. Or we could even do nothing.
After rambling a bit, I'd think the first one, if doable sounds best.
--
Tom Rini (TR1265)
http://gate.crashing.org/~trini/
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