Re: Second round of powerpc subarch investigation : boot-loaders.
On Sun, Oct 19, 2003 at 11:29:38AM +0200, Sven Luther wrote:
> Hello,
>
> In order to continue work on making debian-installer subarch friendly, i
> now launch a second round of investigation concerning the way different
> subarches boot. The situation as i understand it is :
>
> newpmac: uses yaboot (uncompressed kernel + separate initrd) or OF
> (.coff kernel, don't know about initrd). Debian-installer will boot with
> yaboot, and the CDrom can be made to be auto-bootable, altough i don't
> know how.
The bootability of the CD is taken care of by mkisofs. It gives the
CD an HFS 'blessing' which makes it bootable, and it boots according
to the ofboot.b script which yaboot supplies.
We have tried to avoid getting users into OF in the past, probably
because it's hard to provide Forth-based support in an installation
manual. I don't know how .coff booting works either.
> oldpmac: uses bootx, miboot, quik or serial console OF. OF uses the
> .coff kernel, don't know about initrd. miboot uses floopy for kernel
> (compressed) and initrd. bootx can use a kernel and separate initrd, and
> quik cannot be used for cdrom boot. It is said that it is possible to
> use miboot to cdrom boot or ssomething such, but i have not confirmed
> these rumors. debian-installer will be installable from either bootx
> (uncompressed kernel + separate initrd) altough we will not provide
> bootx on the CD, or miboot (two or more floppy images).
We do provide BootX in the archive now, it should still be on the CD.
But it's there as a Stuffit archive; it's not usable directly from the
CD and must be installed on the user's hard disk. Someone said
mkisofs could put BootX on the CD as a double-clickable MacOS
application, but I'm skeptical. If it could, then the kernels could
also be placed in the same folder with BootX, and BootX might find
them.
> 3) We build the kernel as part of the debian-installer build system,
> and can thus use a specific configuration, possibly even many of them,
> one of them being specialized for miboot and its 1.3Mo kernel size
> requirement, and build the kernel udebs from that.
This is the solution that prep used in boot-floppies. It was
problematic to be building kernels within the installer build. I don't
have any better ideas though.
--
Debian GNU/Linux Operating System
By the People, For the People
Chris Tillman (a people instance)
toff one at cox dot net
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