Re: New ppc64 installer image available -- installation test report
On Mon, Sep 25, 2017 at 10:45:42PM -0700, Rick Thomas wrote:
> I gave it a whirl. I used the same procedure as described in my previous report.
>
> The differences I noticed were:
>
> When it got to partitioning I chose (as last time) “guided — use whole disk”.
> It produced a partitioning that had a 1MB HFS partition marked as bootable, but no ext2 partition for /boot.
> Based on Frank’s experience that yaboot couldn’t handle ext4, I believe the ext2 /boot is necessary.
> In any case, I manually created one.
Yes yaboot can not handle ext4 anymore, so for yaboot a /boot with ext2
is pretty much required. Grub would have no such issue.
> 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.
>
> It wrote yaboot to the HFS partition OK and rebooted.
> This time it did *not* have any problem finding the root partition, so the boot went without mishap.
> I did not need to use “rescue” to patch yaboot.conf and run ybin.
>
> 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”.
>
> 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.
Well I know yaboot is built using an old version of the libe2fs that
does not support some modern ext4 features, so I would be surprised
if it reliably could read ext4 anymore. It might sometimes work, but
not always.
> 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.
It depends if your ext4 has certain new features enabled/in use or not.
I remember when I switched to ext4 on x86 originally, grub 0.97 was fine
with it, until my next new kernel was installed and it somehow was written
using extents which grub 0.97 at the time could not read, and hence the
old kernel I could boot but the new one I could not until I patched grub
to support that. So really it depends what state your ext4 is in.
I don't like my boot process to depend on that, so ext2 for /boot with
yaboot seems like a very good idea for keeping things stable and working.
> 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).
It sounds like plenty. How big do they seem to be? My memory tells me
something like 300k is all grub uses so far but I may be out of date.
--
Len Sorensen
Reply to: