Installing snapshot 2021-01-03 on a PowerMac G5

Hello everyone,

and a happy new year to you. Thanks to Covid19-based restrictions I returned to a Mac PPC (PowerMac 11,2) the last days to rejoin the Apple hardware party of my youth and do happy compiling on PPC64.

My attempts were not that lucky at all because each turn of trying to install the snapshot mentioned failed.

I’m listing my observations here. Please tell me if and where to post logs and/or bug reports. Thank you.

The issues I observed:

partman did not create a boot/HFS partition the /usr/lib/os-probes tests could recognize. It seems these scripts utilize blkid, but blkid would only recognize my boot partition (2MB) as HFS after I manually formatted it using hformat.
Selecting KDE as environment in tasksel did not work (seems not all dependencies could be resolved, but I did not dig deeper into this), I chose Xfce, using that installation worked.
But whatever I did (even after fixing first issue), I did not manage to install grub. I even tried the „ugly hack“, mentioned at https://www.u58733p55594.web0093.zxcs-klant.nl/installation/grub-problem/ to replace hfsprogs with an older snapshot within the target chroot. The result stayed the same:

grub-installer: info: Running chroot /target grub-install  --force "dummy"
grub-installer: Installing for powerpc-ieee1275 platform.
grub-installer: grub-install: error:
grub-installer:
grub-installer: cannot find a GRUB drive for dummy.  Check your device.map
grub-installer: .
grub-installer: error: Running 'grub-install  --force "dummy"' failed.

If you need the full syslog, partman log and so on, just tell me where to upload/store it.

Last question in advance: I saw sid PPC64 ships kernel version 5.10. Is the following issue already patched or am I going to run into that one as well and should wait until kernel has been updated to at least 5.10.2 (my PowerMac G5 still runs a GeForce 6600 currently)?

https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=210517

Thanks for your support in advance
Johannes