Re: New ppc64 installer image available -- installation test report
On Sep 26, 2017, at 12:07 AM, John Paul Adrian Glaubitz <glaubitz@physik.fu-berlin.de> wrote:
> On 09/26/2017 07:45 AM, Rick Thomas wrote:
>
>> One other oddity I noticed was that the HFS partition was not labeled “bootstrap” as it has always been in the past.
>> The name does not appear to be necessary, but loosing it would be a break from tradition.
>
> What do you mean with "in the past"? Which installation image?
My reference for “tradition” is the Jessie (and previous releases) installer for powerpc on a G4 (32-bit) and a G5 (64-bit) Mac.
> Please note that our reference is the powerpc NETINST installation ISO.
OK.
>> As an experiment, I did try booting from the CD and entering “rescue” at the boot prompt.
>> It booted fine, but (as before) it came up in “install” mode, not “rescue”.
>
> Please ignore this for now and let’s only focus on the proper partitioning.
Understood.
>> If you think it would be helpful, I can do it again but leave the partitioning alone —
>> not create an ext2 /boot partition. This would verify (or falsify) Frank’s observation
>> that yaboot requires ext2.
>
> Yes, can you please test this? Apparently, the /boot partition is not always required,
> see the reference to [2] below.
I tried it. I got the same “Unknown or corrupt filesystem” error message from yaboot as Frank did.
>
>> Interestingly, I have a G4 (32-bit) Mac that lacks a separate /boot partition and uses
>> ext4 for its root partition. It boots fine using yaboot version 1.3.16-4.
>> The G5 I’m doing tests on is using yaboot version 1.3.17-4.
>
> When was that machine installed?
February 5, 2017, using the Jessie installer available at the time. It’s running more or less stock Jessie powerpc.
One of the links [1] Frank gave for the ext4 problem indicated that it was a 64-bit feature in ext4 that yaboot couldn’t cope with. It also talked about disabling that feature for 64-bit powerpc until it could be fixed. Could be relevant?
[1] https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=825110#67
> In this context, I just found this commit [2] which added the /boot partition. Note the
> additional "$defaultignore{}" designation which apparently means the partition is not
> created in all cases.
In light of the above, it seems that it should not be ignored by default.
>> One other thought: A single MB for the HFS partition may be too small if we want to
>> support both grub and yaboot at the same time. How about 2MB (or even 10? — disk
>> space is cheap).
>
> Again, please write that down and let's resolve that later. It's very easy to change
> the partition sizes and we can do that. However, it's more important to get the
> basic partitioning fixed first.
Understood.
>
> Adrian
Rick
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