Hi Rick and Adrian, As I've dealt with these things many years ago I'll just try to brain dump stuff that I still remember. On 09/26/2017 09:00 AM, John Paul Adrian Glaubitz wrote: > On 09/26/2017 11:53 AM, John Paul Adrian Glaubitz wrote: >> But I'm not sure why we should invest time into improving Yaboot. I >> didn't >> even work on my POWER7 system. So, while we would make Yaboot work on >> PowerMac G5 computers, it would still be broken on POWER4/5/6/7. Plus, >> Yaboot is unmaintained both in Debian and upstream. I would say abandon yaboot ASAP. We could keep it on life support for the sake of making installer images bootable and for easier transition of Mac machines to Grub. That said, if not done already, creation of bootable iso images should also transition from Yaboot to Grub. > > After digging some a bit more into debian-installer, I noticed today that > the powerpc installation image actually supports three types of bootloaders > for installation: Yaboot, GRUB, PREP with the priority for being installed > in that order. > > Thus, any powerpc system can actually be also installed with these > bootloaders when skipping the automatic installation of Yaboot. So, > I will next add ppc64 support to grub-installer and prep-installer. The 1MB HFS partition on Mac machines, which holds yaboot binary and which gets marked as bootable (blessed in Apple lingo) by yaboot tools is too small for grub. You have to make it larger, make sure installer puts grub binary in it and have it "blessed with holy penguin pee" (in yaboot lingo). Then work out grub bugs, if any are left, and you are all set. You should still be able to put yaboot in that larger HFS partition. So, as partitioning goes bumping the HFS partition size up would be the right thing to do. Just for the sake of mentioning this, it is also possible to create vmlinuz kernel image using mkvmlinuz and put it in that HFS partition, bless it and let the firmware load the kernel directly with no boot loader involved at all. > > I'm still a bit undecided about the ext4 issue with Yaboot. I actually > would tend to always use the ext2 /boot partitions for all installations > and revert the work-around used for partman-ext3. Yaboot is able to read ext4 partitions formatted with e2fsprogs1.41 and earlier. Disabling the features added in later ext4 versions in installer is a temporary workaround that is not sustainable as Ted keeps adding those newer features quite regularly. M
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