Re: Updated installer images
Hi,
On 09/20/2017 08:55 PM, John Paul Adrian Glaubitz wrote:
[...]
* The yaboot menu offers both `install` and `install32`, are 32 bit Power Macs then still supported by the installation?
No, not at all. If you want to install on 32-bit hardware, you still need to
use the powerpc NETINST image which can be found here:
http://jenkins.kfreebsd.eu/jenkins/view/cd/job/debian-cd_sid_powerpc/ws/
Now that's interesting, I assumed the powerpc architecture was dropped
with Stretch. But apparently it's still in Sid. I appreciate this for
all my 32 bit PowerPC machines.
[...]
* The installer starts up with the "Select a language" screen, the background is red though (also mentioned by Christoph Biedl).
* The background stays red throughout the installation
This must a bug specific to Apple (New World?) machines. I don't see this
problem when installing on my POWER7 machine.
Christoph mentioned [#825840] as possible cause. From what I read it
also looks like this does not affect people that use serial consoles,
but I haven't yet tried that on my Xserve G5.
[#825840]: https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=825840
* The "Partition disks" screen starts with saying:
```
This partitioner doesn't have information about the default type of the partition tables on your architecture. Please send an e-mail message to
debian-boot@lists.debian.org with information. Please note that if the type of the partition table is unsupported by libparted, then this partitioner will not
work properly.
Continue with partitioning?
```
I assume this is the problem you refer to.
Yes, this is because partman-partitioning hasn't support for ppc64 yet which
I just found out today.
It needs to be added here:
https://anonscm.debian.org/cgit/d-i/partman-partitioning.git/tree/lib/disk-label.sh
I will do that tomorrow.
Great, I'll follow this to see how the process works.
[...]
### 2017-09-20 #2 ###
Same as for try #1 today, but this time I created an additional partition for `/boot` - as EXT2 is considered working, I tried with EXT3 to see if this will
also work with yaboot 1.3.17. The installation finished as before but after rebooting, yaboot was now able to load the kernel and initrd and the machine could
boot through to the login prompt.
The whole installation took 20 minutes.
This could be fixed by adding partitioning recipes for ppc64 in partman-auto:
https://anonscm.debian.org/cgit/d-i/partman-auto.git/tree/
However, I'm still not sure whether we should actually use GRUB on ppc64 by default.
Maybe both should be used for a time frame. Yaboot works pretty well for
network booting - although not related to on disk installations -
without much adaptation between Apple G5s and IBM POWER5s (and possibly
newer machines) and on-disk file systems or its default configurations
are not an issue in this case. But maybe Grub can work pretty well
there, too, I just haven't tested it yet.
### Conclusion ###
So installations on Power Macintosh G5 (11,2) machines with the current image should work correctly as long as:
* the mac partition table setting is used during partitioning
* a separate unused partition with boot flag enabled for the boot loader is created (1 MiB or maybe also 819200 Byte is enough)
* a separate partition for `/boot` with EXT2 (untested by me, but seems to work for others, see links above) or EXT3 (tested by me) is created
Can you try to set up GRUB on your machine? It would be interesting whether GRUB
works on all ppc64 machines, including Mac NewWorld hardware.
I'll give that a try on my G5 and report the results. From what you
write, can I assume that Grub already works well on POWER7 machines?
Thanks in any case for the detailed testing and documentation. This saves me the
time to perform all these tests myself on my own Apple PowerMac G5.
You're welcome.
Cheers,
Frank
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