On 1/28/19 14:01, John Paul Adrian Glaubitz wrote:
On 1/28/19 1:52 PM, Frank Scheiner wrote:@Rick: I thought about something like this since Mark reported the bootstrap limits in OpenBIOS. It could in principle work similar to the switch between non-GPT and GPT capable SPARC hardware ([1]).I don't understand this argument. GRUB works on PowerPC Macs and is fully supported or am I missing something? I also works fine on SPARC hardware with Sun partition tables.
We implemented a switch in d-i/grub-installer that allows to install GRUB in the required way for non-GPT and GPT capable SPARC hardware. Theoretically something similar could be created - at a different place though, i.e. before the partitioning step - to support both HFS and FAT16 bootstrap methods in the installer for NewWorld Power Macs. I.e. a user decision expands the "powermac_newworld" subarch to "powermac_newworld_hfs" or "powermac_newworld_fat" and this information is (1) then used by the partitioning step to choose the required partitioning scheme and (2) by the bootloader installation step to choose the required installation method. So for sure no small development effort would be required. But as said, as long as nobody maintains the software (i.e. yaboot and HFS related stuff for the yaboot case or just the HFS related stuff for the GRUB case) a development effort for that isn't justified IMHO. Cheers, Frank