Re: NVRAM emulation issues in QEMU
Hi Mark!
On 3/29/22 09:37, Mark Cave-Ayland wrote:
> I'd probably lean lightly towards having a separate dialog with an "Ignore"
> option for the "nvram" update step if it goes wrong, as I have no idea how
> often this can fail on a real Mac given the age of the hardware.
Since the firmware on a PowerMac is searching for bootable partitions automatically
according to documentation [1], I don't really see a need for touching the NVRAM
at all.
We did this in the past because Yaboot's installer was tinkering with the NVRAM
setting and we assumed it was necessary.
In the end, I just removed the code to modify the NVRAM contents [2] since that's
the easiest and least error-prone approach. This way we also avoid additional
potential bugs and additional translation work since any dialog would have to
be translated by the l10n team.
> However I don't mind too much whatever you choose as long as it is clearly
> documented somewhere so I can answer questions that any QEMU PPC users may have.
Once the latest grub-installer has been uploaded to unstable, the installation
images will just work on QEMU without any additional hacks.
FWIW, I gave it a try configuring a Mac99 QEMU VM from virt-manager yesterday
and I couldn't get it to work, OpenBIOS wouldn't let me use the keyboard and
it also wouldn't find the bootable CD.
Using QEMU from the command line works fine though. So it seems that virt-manager
needs to improve its templates for PowerMac emulation.
Adrian
> [1] https://opensource.apple.com/source/bless/bless-37/README.BOOTING
> [2] https://salsa.debian.org/installer-team/grub-installer/-/commit/f7eb12f89844475db8f79bf90546d36e8bb0dfb6
--
.''`. 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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