Re: Does someone use grub?
On Sat, 2009-03-21 at 22:08 +0000, Jörg Sommer wrote:
>
> does someone of you use grub on PowerPC?
I do.
> I thought about replacing yaboot by grub, but a deeper look showed I
> have to do stuff by hand, i.e. it misses a default configuration.
What do you mean by that? I don't remember doing anything special other
than mounting the HFS bootstrap partition on /boot/grub.
However, note that there's a couple of bugs which may be a problem:
http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=516458
http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=520286
I'm using self-built binaries with these patched.
In any case, you obviously shouldn't change the boot-device variable in
NVRAM from yaboot to GRUB until you've successfully booted the latter
manually from the OF prompt.
> Is it worth to do it? Is grub better than yaboot?
I can't answer that for you, but FWIW my main motivations were:
* I was able to migrate my filesystem from ext3 to ext4 without
repartitioning for a separate /boot which yaboot can read. In
general, GRUB2 supports many more filesystems as well as things
like LVM and RAID (at least in theory, can't say how well these
things work on powerpc at this point).
* update-grub2 automagically adds all kernels and any
corresponding initrds in /boot to /boot/grub/grub.cfg (with
'postinst_hook = update-grub2' and 'postrm_hook = update-grub2'
in /etc/kernel-img.conf), I no longer have to take care that the
symlinks referenced in yaboot.conf remain valid when removing
kernel images.
* More powerful user interface at boot time, e.g. you can change
boot parameters in an editor, and there's tab completion for
filenames, so even if there is a problem with the kernel entries
in grub.cfg, it's easier than with yaboot to manually specify
the kernel and initrd to boot.
> Can grub boot OS X and from CD, i.e. that what enablecdboot in
> yaboot offers?
I don't know of any way to do these, but I haven't really tried to find
out if there is because it's easy enough to do these things from OF
anyway: hold the C key on bootup to boot from the optical drive, hold
the alt key to get a GUI boot volume chooser.
--
Earthling Michel Dänzer | http://www.vmware.com
Libre software enthusiast | Debian, X and DRI developer
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