Re: request for help to make powerpc custom boot disks
On 11-Oct-2001 Michael Schmitz wrote:
>> > a good explanation (or a link to an Howto or a FAQ on it) would be greatly
>> > appreciated. I really need to solve this problem...
>> >
>>
>> I can hazard a guess that the reason you're not hearing anything here, is
>> that the capability to make a boot floppy for powerpc's doesn't exist yet.
>> You're plowing new ground, there aren't any FAQs or HowTo's.
>
> It's a Mac, right? One of the old ones, with RealBrokenFirmware, at that?
> If that OF version cannot boot off a floppy directly, you're out of luck
> (if I understood Ethan's post on that topic right, you'd need to have
> MacOS drivers on that floppy, these are proprietary and cannot be
> distributed by Debian. See the archives for this).
yes it is an oldworld Mac with a really broken openfirmware, but I am able to
boot from a floppy disk. In fact the Debian ones work well and I just need to
add nfs support to it (in fact to powermac/images-1.44/boot-floppy-hfs.img) and
change the default framebuffer resolution a bit...
So I took the .config from kernel-patch-2.2.19-powerpc, patched the 2.2.19
kernel sources, added nfs support, recompiled and put that kernel back to the
boot floppy, blessed the floppy with hattrib... but either the kernel I created
is not good or I missed something because I can not render the floppy bootable.
Note that when I redo this same procedure with the original kernel coming from
the boot floppy itself, it boots well again. So I think this could be a problem
with the type of kernel I use, is this vmlinux.coff that I should use for that
bootdisk? Or an other kernel? Do I need to use Miboot to make this floppy
bootable again?
>
> Even if OF was up to the task: 'floppy' and 'without user intervention'
it is.
> doesn't sound quite right to me. Last time I checked, MacOS would spit out
> the floppy on shutdown/reboot.
But there is no MacOs in this Mac anymore, and as far as I remember the floppy
is not ejected (and that would not have been a big problem anyway).
> If that doesn't scare you - the CHRP boot scripts commonly used to pick
> Linux or MockOS, plus whatever OF-loadable bootstrap, plus some code in
> the kernel to extract and relocate a compressed kernel, might do the
> trick.
>
> If _I_ may hazard a guess: it's probably been considered too hard and not
> useful enough to try by others. You need the feature, you're in the best
> position to implement it.
>
> Michael
I don't thinks I need to do anything complicated or unusual. I just want to
make the same boot disk than what Debian ships (the famous
/woody/main/disks-powerpc/3.0.13-2001-08-25/powermac/images-1.44/boot-floppy-hfs
.img bootdisk) but with a custom kernel.
So do you know what steps were used to make this boot floppy?
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