Re: New discussion: ppc64 installer -- ext2 /boot partition to keep sabot happy.

[Rick Thomas <rbthomas@pobox.com>]

>> On Oct 1, 2017, at 11:00 AM, Rick Thomas <rbthomas@pobox.com> wrote:
>> 
>> Adrian and Milan,
>> 
>> Thank you for the explanations.  It’s much clearer to me now!
>> 
>> I did a couple of experiments today.

          …

>> 2) I did an installation with Adrian’s latest install image (Debian GNU/Linux 9.0 _Sid_ - Unofficial ppc64 NETINST 20170930-18:36).  I chose “guided - use whole disk with LVM”.  As expected, it created a 1MB HFS bootstrap position and a 250MB /boot (ext2) partition.  I chose a minimal system with ssh.  All went well and it installed yaboot.  I did not see a chance to install grub2 — is that expected?  It rebooted fine using yaboot.  So all is well on that front.
>> 
>> Hope it helps!
>> Rick

> On Oct 1, 2017, at 2:08 AM, John Paul Adrian Glaubitz <glaubitz@physik.fu-berlin.de> wrote:
> 
> You can install GRUB instead of Yaboot if you go back to the main menu. The GRUB installation menu item comes right after Yaboot.
> 
> Try to run it after partitioning manually and let me know what you get. You may have to manually mount the HFS partition to /target/boot/grub from a shell.
> 
> Adrian

I tried the latest:  "Debian GNU/Linux 9.0 "Sid" - Unofficial ppc64 NETINST 20171005-07:56”

I did an “expert” mode install.  At partitioning time, I created an 8MB bootable partition and a 250MB ext2 partition for /boot.

There was no “grub” entry in the main menu of the installer [*], so I went ahead and installed yaboot.  It booted fine.  After booting I installed the “grub2” packages (and all its dependent packages) mounted the bootstrap HFS partition at /boot/grub, and tried to run grub-install.  This ran for a bit then errored out with the message:
    error cannot write to `/boot/grub/…` No space left on device.

looking at what it had written, all 8MB was indeed nearly full.  The largest part was 4.1MB taken up by /boot/grub/locales and 1.5MB of fonts.

I didn’t use any options for grub-install.  There may be some way to trim down the un-needed stuff, but I didn’t dig into it that far.  If not, then 8MB isn’t enough space for Grub.

[*] The installer main menu looks like this:
    …
Select and install software
Install yaboot on a hard disk
Continue without a boot loader
Finish the installation
    …

There is no mention of “grub” anywhere.

Have I missed something?
Rick