Re: New discussion: ppc64 installer -- ext2 /boot partition to keep sabot happy.
On 09/26/2017 05:12 PM, Milan Kupcevic wrote:
> 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.
I fully agree.
> That said, if not done already, creation of bootable iso images should
> also transition from Yaboot to Grub.
That's not been done yet, unfortunately. I want to tackle the installation
of GRUB onto the target system first.
> 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.
Ok, so I guess the first step would be to patch partman-auto to increase
the size of the bootloader partition for all sub-architectures.
Question: Does GRUB work on all the PowerPC variants that Yaboot supports?
According to [1], Yaboot supports:
- Mac Newworld, CHRP, CHRP/RS6000, CHRP_IBM and Cell.
Are these all supported by GRUB? If yes, the transition won't break
anything. I don't know what platforms like Oldworld use though. I assume
they are booted from Penguin from MacOS?
> 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.
Ok. But I guess I prefer GRUB whenever possible?
>> 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.
Yeah, lets not open this particular can of worms :).
So, do we all agree that the first thing is to increase the size of the
bootloader partitions for the aforementioned systems?
Patches are welcome in any case. I have, as said before, full commit
access to debian-installer and its components, so getting the changes
merged won't take too long.
Adrian
> [1] https://anonscm.debian.org/cgit/d-i/yaboot-installer.git/tree/debian/control
--
.''`. John Paul Adrian Glaubitz
: :' : Debian Developer - glaubitz@debian.org
`. `' Freie Universitaet Berlin - glaubitz@physik.fu-berlin.de
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