Re: [PATCH v2 4/5] Patch the CHRP boot script
Hi Adrian,
On 11/18/2017 09:40 PM, John Paul Adrian Glaubitz wrote:
Hi Frank!
Sorry for my brevity, currently on mobile but one question:
How did you determine the OF pathname when you installed GRUB manually on your Macs? And can’t we just use this mechanism?
There was no need for that IIRC, as I installed a GRUB image (named
grub.img) in the same path (the NewWorld bootstrap partition's root
directory) where yaboot was installed, and only later set its file type
to tbxi to allow automatic boot. As yaboot had already blessed that
directory, the GRUB image was booted instead of yaboot's ofboot.b (which
is a CHRP script and boots either a binary from CDROM or the yaboot
binary) with the default NVRAM settings of "hd:,\\:tbxi" for boot-device.
And, I agree, depending on any Yaboot components is a no-go. If GRUB has bugs, we need to report them and fix them.
Well, it's actually not GRUB that has the bugs, but the ofpathname tool
from powerpc-ibm-utils that is used by GRUB internally - if it can be
considered a bug for an IBM tool to not (fully) support Apple hardware.
But on the other hand it could also be considered a GRUB bug to use this
IBM tool on NewWorld Power Macs to determine an OF path.
I cannot merge any patches to grub-installer which add Yaboot dependencies.
One solution could be to move ofpath out of the yaboot package into a
more generic one, e.g. powerpc-utils. Assuming that IBM is maintaining
ofpathname I doubt that they want to adapt it to support NewWorld Power
Macs, if they are already reluctant to continue support for pre-POWER8
machines.
I'd like to check the behaviour of ofpath and ofpathname on my G3/G4
Power Macs and Xserve but this will take a while, as most of them are in
storage currently and far away. I only have a Mac mini G4 at hand
currently for testing. I have a feeling that ofpathname might not work
for these machines, too, but ofpath might work. But I'm unsure as long
as I don't perform some testing.
As we intend to also support 32 bit NewWorld Power Macs, it might save
resources to continue to use an existing and working shell script over a
new development or an unknown effort to patch a currently non-working
tool (be it ofpathname (also a shell script) or grub-ofpathname (a C
program)).
What do you think?
Cheers,
Frank
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