powerpc/iBookG4 sid-iso (yaboot failing)
Hi,
Today I downloaded the latest powerpc/sid netinst iso[0] in order to
revive my iBookG4 (and hopefully help bring PowerPC back to
Debian/testing). Unfortunately the ISO image (burned to CD) would not
boot, causing various errors such as "Decrementer exception". Using
qemu, I can boot the CD medium, so the CD should be fine. Also, if I use
older yaboot-based ISO images, such as jessie or the openSUSE ISO image
mentioned (below), I have no problems. Searching around I found multiple
sites that claim the yaboot version 1.3.17 is to blame.
I realize I could just install jessie to my system and upgrade to
sid. But I have a strong interest in helping to get sid installable
out-of-the-box so that PowerPC can make its way back to testing.
I have a couple questions regarding the bootable ISO issue:
1. Can someone point me to some documentation (or scripts or anything)
so I can look into building my own powerpc/netinst for sid using an
older yaboot? I need some way to effectively debug this issue.
2. Last month there were talks of getting grub running instead of
yaboot. Would that include the bootable ISO's as well or is it only
for the installed Debian systems? I would be happy to offer my
support for PowerPC (iBook/G4 and PowerBook/G4) testing/implementing.
John Ogness
[0] http://jenkins.kfreebsd.eu/jenkins/view/cd/job/debian-cd_sid_powerpc/ws/build/debian-unofficial-powerpc-NETINST-1.iso
On 2017-09-21, John Paul Adrian Glaubitz <glaubitz@physik.fu-berlin.de> wrote:
> On 09/21/2017 04:32 PM, Lennart Sorensen wrote:
>> Well in the case of IBM power systems, you use a DOS MBR partition scheme
>> and you create a Prep boot partition, which should be 1MB or so in size,
>> and grub is installed there as a raw image. Has been working fine for
>> a while as far as I have been able to tell.
>
> Ok, good to know. What about GPT partition tables? On ppc64el, i.e. POWER8
> and newer, the default labels are all GPT. Any idea which is the earliest
> POWER5+ machine which supports GPT or should we just assume MS-DOS
> partition tabels for all POWER machines?
>
>> The grub modules stay in whatever /boot is on, and the grub image
>> generated contains enough of grub to read filesystems and is loaded
>> by the firmware from the prep boot partition (it litterally reads that
>> partition into ram as raw data, and executes it).
>
> Interesting. Do you know whether the mechanism is the same? My worries
> are that users on older PowerPC hardware, especially Apple Macintosh
> would have to go through extra lengths to get this working.
>
> It seems that openSUSE for ppc and ppc64 always seems to default to
> GRUB.
>
> Could someone with both 32-bit and 64-bit Macs maybe perform test
> installations of openSUSE on their machines?
>
>> http://download.opensuse.org/ports/ppc/tumbleweed/iso/
>
> The latest release for 32-bit powerpc seems to be 11.1:
>
>> http://mirrors.vbi.vt.edu/linux/opensuse/discontinued/distribution/11.1/iso/
>
> You can also test other distributions like Fedora, for example. Latest
> version with ppc32 support seems to be 12:
>
>> https://archives.fedoraproject.org/pub/archive/fedora/linux/releases/12/Fedora/ppc/iso/
>
> The more test results we have, the better. If it turns out that GRUB will
> even work properly on 32-bit PowerPC machines, I think it would be the
> best option to make GRUB default for "powerpc" as well.
>
> Of course, we can still keep yaboot on the FTP archives. It will not
> be a potential source of issues anymore, however.
>
> Adrian
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