Re: Changing bootstrap method for NewWorld Power Macs
On 30/12/2018 21:01, Frank Scheiner wrote:
> Dear Adrian, dear Mathieu,
>
> so actually what I wrote earlier would be a major obstacle for supporting GRUB on
> NewWorld Power Macs...
>
> I write "would be", because there is another way which lets us safely ignore any
> issues with HFS as bootstrap partition for NewWorld Power Macs:
>
> Open Firmware (IEEE 1275) can actually also boot from FAT file systems and this is
> also supported on NewWorld Power Macs.
Unfortunately not everyone uses Open Firmware, and in particular OpenBIOS provided
with QEMU doesn't currently support FAT filesystems. So as the QEMU macppc maintainer
this change would then immediately cause the latest Debian images to fail to boot,
which is not something I can get excited about.
Whilst I think this is a clever hack, pretty much all of the bootsectors I see for
macppc across all OSs are either ISO9660 or HFS. This makes me nervous that the
reason people have avoided switching to FAT before now is because either the
FAT-related drivers still have endian-related bugs, or not all Apple Open Firmwares
are bug free in this area. If it really is that simple, why isn't everyone doing it?
Can you remind me again what were the problems that you were experiencing with HFS
under GRUB?
ATB,
Mark.
Reply to: