Re: installing NETINST 20190127 on Mac mini G4
On 1/28/19 2:30 PM, Rick Thomas wrote:
>> Yaboot is unmaintained upstream and does not support modern ext4 features. In
>> order for Yaboot to work properly, you have to turn certain features in ext4
>> off, otherwise it won't work and the boot fails.
>>
>> Unless someone picks up maintenance work on Yaboot and makes it work with
>> modern ext4 versions, I don’t see any particular reason to keep Yaboot.
>
> It’s not necessary to make yaboot work with modern ext4. It’s only necessary
> to have a separate /boot partition which is ext2, as is the current procedure
> when the user chooses LVM partitioning. Yaboot already requires a separate hfs
> bootstrap partition, so I don’t think having a separate ext2 /boot is that
> much of a stretch.
But again, what is the exact gain in keeping Yaboot? Does Yaboot have any
features which you are missing in GRUB?
Generally speaking, distributions try to keep packages only which are maintained
upstream and for which fixes are provided in case something breaks. Furthermore,
adding the possibility to install multiple bootloaders also means having to
maintain more code and packages.
Both debian-cd and debian-installer and the various utilities for manipulation
filesystems like ISO and ext4 constantly being developed while Yaboot is not, so
the chance that Yaboot will break in another way in the near future is certainly
there.
>>> Are there other architectures where something like this might be useful?
>>
>> Why do you think should the installer support a boot loader that is known
>> to be buggy and unmaintained? If users insist on using Yaboot, they can
>> still install it manually. I do not see a point, however, to keep it in
>> the archive.
>
> When I asked about other architectures, I was asking if there are any cases
> where there are two (or more) alternative boot loaders for a given architecture
> and users might want to have a choice between them?
debian-installer installs GRUB as the default bootloader on every platform
where it's supported. Users are still free to install whatever bootloader
they want after the installation has been completed and the system has
been rebooted.
> Yaboot may be buggy and unmaintained, but then so is the hardware it runs on.
> PowerPC Macs haven’t had any updates that I know of in several years.
You are comparing apples and oranges here. Yaboot causes compatibility
issues with other software because other software is being developed
not with the bugs and limitations of Yaboot in mind.
Hardware bugs and limitations are, however, always relevant when software
is being developed simply because those bugs and limitations in hardware
cannot be changed.
> If the only known bug is that it doesn’t support modern ext4 features,
> I have to say that’s something we know how to live with — a separate ext2
> /boot partition fixes the problem.
But what's your problem with GRUB? I really don't see the point, sorry.
You are certainly free to use whatever bootloader and software you want,
but I am also free to maintain whatever software and packages that I consider
worth maintaining.
The ext4-related problems in Yaboot weren't the only issues. There were
also other regressions in Yaboot which made it crash on certain PPC
Macs. There was a discussion on this list about this some months ago.
> I agree that migrating to grub has lots of advantages, and it’s something
> we should do if we are serious about having a Debian port for powerpc
> hardware. But at the present moment, grub isn’t working. All I’m
> suggesting is that while we work on grub, we can make the transition
> smoother by providing something for the time being that does work.
But GRUB installation works perfectly fine on IBM PowerPC hardware,
it's just the Macs that require extra work. If someone really wants
to install Debian on PPC Mac now and doesn't want to go through the
extra work of installing Yaboot or GRUB manually, they can just use
an older installation image and upgrade that to Debian unstable.
> And don’t forget, there is a significant group of folks for whom yaboot,
> for all of it’s problems, is a necessary part of using Debian on their
> hardware.
Which PPC hardware supports Yaboot but does not support GRUB? I'm
not aware of any.
>> partman-ext3 still contains a work-around on powerpc [1] which I would
>> like to get rid of. The workaround turns off 64-bit support in ext4
>> and checksumming of metadata, both features are desirable to have
>> these days.
>
> If the reason for that work-around is solely to allow yaboot to work
> with an ext[34] root, I think my proposal solves the problem. As long as
> yaboot only has to deal with ext2, you can remove the work-around any
> time it’s convenient.
I don't want to work on Yaboot, sorry.
Adrian
--
.''`. John Paul Adrian Glaubitz
: :' : Debian Developer - glaubitz@debian.org
`. `' Freie Universitaet Berlin - glaubitz@physik.fu-berlin.de
`- GPG: 62FF 8A75 84E0 2956 9546 0006 7426 3B37 F5B5 F913
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