Re: Why it's so difficult to fix PowerMac booting for good
On 05/29 2023 13:52 John Paul Adrian Glaubitz wrote:
For one, Gentoo is not Debian. And secondly, you cannot just look at the
upstream sources since there are also many downstream changes in the Debian
package in the form of patches to fix compatibility issues, CVEs and so on.
Makes sense, but then if the minimal PowerPC-specific binary doesn't
change between package updates, a new image wouldn't be necessary.
I get the other issue though (additional big package and additional work
required by maintainer), which is unnecessary if the mkfs tool for hfs
was available...
BTW, a workaround similar to the one yaboot may use would be to only
have an image of an empty HFS volume (of fixed size) as a package, and
use the free (now unmaintained, but who cares?) hfsutils hcopy and
hattrib for the rest. Re-initializing the image would only make it
necessary to recopy the boot files. All that's missing is mkfs and fsck,
both are not required if we were to use an image of an empty HFS filesystem.
Because I am talking about Apple's »diskdev_cmds« and »hfs« packages, not the ones
you mentioned above which are both dead upstream, by the way. Apple's packages are
APSL which Debian considers non-free, unfortunately [1].
Thanks. I knew Debian is very restrictive, especially between free and
non-free, which is why I'm very much in favour of Debian in the first
place. The PITA on x86 always was the non-free firmware. Seeing how
Debian moved to include those non-free firmware blobs not very long ago
makes me wonder if such an exception wouldn't also be possible for
diskdev_cmds, since this seems quite essential on PowerPCs (just like
firmware blobs on x86).
How did Debian include the non-free firmware? Would there be a similar
way to get diskdev_cmds into the powerpc port?
Not by Debian, see [1]. If you feel like convincing the Debian Legal team that
APSL is DFSG-compatible, please go ahead. I have given up on this.
Well, reading the discussion about the license makes me be on their
side. But then, it's like the firmware blobs: in theory we don't want
them in a free operating system, but in reality we have not much of a
choice if we want to actually use the hardware...
hfsutils works like mtools, it doesn't use the kernel's VFS layer. Tools like "fsck"
and "mkfs" are still on the TODO list as you can see in the TODO file [2] ...
Thanks, I missed this important detail. hformat is just a stub, it
doesn't really do anything...
Just having a fully working »hfsprogs« under a DFSG-compatible license available would
solve all the problems with the bootloader installation on Apple PowerMac, including
making the whole process much more robust and also compliant with the remaining archi-
tectures.
Yes.
If I find the time, I'll play a bit with FAT formatted bootstrap
partitions. Maybe something undocumented actually works. I hate the idea
though that a NVRAM bootdevice setting would be necessary, I very much
prefer an out-of-the-box OS Picker compatible way. But since :tbxi is a
no-go with FAT, I honestly doubt that there is...
Linux User #330250
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