Re: Bug#589701: ofpath is not compatible with non-builtin disk controllers

[Rick Thomas <rbthomas@pobox.com>]

On Sep 29, 2010, at 12:12 AM, Milan Kupcevic wrote:

> On 09/28/2010 07:26 PM, Benjamin Cama wrote:
> > Well, even if you didn't mention it explicitly, it was listed in the
> > lspci dump since the beginning and nobody saw it until now. And one  
> > may
> > also find it disturbing that a piece of software doesn't work with an
> > addon card on a machine that has free slots to add such cards ! But
> > bootstrapping an OS on non-original hardware modification is always a
> > bit hard.
>
> Promise add-on sata controllers do not have proper OpenFirmware  
> support.
> Therefore, they will never be able to boot an OpenFirmware machine.
> There are very few add-on SATA controllers with proper OpenFirmware
> support. Here are four I personally tried out:
>
> Sonnet Tempo SATA PCI [1]
> SeriTek/1V4 [2]
> SeriTek/1eVE2+2 [3]
> SeriTek/1S2 [4]
>
> Other SeriTek cards explicitly described as "compatible with all
> PCI-based Power PC Macintosh computers" with "completely self- 
> contained
> booting functionality" should probably work equally well.
>
> If you find other add-on sata controller(s) able to boot a PowerMac
> machine, please let me know.
>
> M
>
>
>  [1] http://www.sonnettech.com/product/tempo_serial_ata.html
>  [2] http://www.firmtek.com/seritek/seritek-1v4/
>  [3] http://www.firmtek.com/seritek/seritek-1ve2plus2/
>  [4] http://www.firmtek.com/seritek/seritek-1s2/

OK... If I'm understanding this correctly, it means that NewWorld  
Mac's can boot either from the on-board ATA or one of these OF- 
supporting SATA controllers  (possibly with some tweaks to ofpath to  
deal with any peculiarities of the non-Apple controllers) but *not*  
from most non-OF-aware controllers.

I, for one, can live with that as long as I've got some small ATA  
drives I can use for the purpose.  All I have to put on it is the  
"apple bootstrap (HFS) partition" and /boot, right?  But root and all  
the rest can be on the big SATAs, right?

It's not "beautiful" or elegant, but it is a reasonable work-around  
for a problem that we can't fix in the Debian environment.

Or am I missing something?

Rick