On Sep 26, 2017, at 12:07 AM, John Paul Adrian Glaubitz <glaub...@physik.fu-berlin.de> wrote:
> On 09/26/2017 07:45 AM, Rick Thomas wrote: > >> One other oddity I noticed was that the HFS partition was not labeled >> “bootstrap” as it has always been in the past. >> The name does not appear to be necessary, but loosing it would be a break >> from tradition. > > What do you mean with "in the past"? Which installation image? My reference for “tradition” is the Jessie (and previous releases) installer for powerpc on a G4 (32-bit) and a G5 (64-bit) Mac. > Please note that our reference is the powerpc NETINST installation ISO. OK. >> As an experiment, I did try booting from the CD and entering “rescue” at the >> boot prompt. >> It booted fine, but (as before) it came up in “install” mode, not “rescue”. > > Please ignore this for now and let’s only focus on the proper partitioning. Understood. >> If you think it would be helpful, I can do it again but leave the >> partitioning alone — >> not create an ext2 /boot partition. This would verify (or falsify) Frank’s >> observation >> that yaboot requires ext2. > > Yes, can you please test this? Apparently, the /boot partition is not always > required, > see the reference to [2] below. I tried it. I got the same “Unknown or corrupt filesystem” error message from yaboot as Frank did. > >> Interestingly, I have a G4 (32-bit) Mac that lacks a separate /boot >> partition and uses >> ext4 for its root partition. It boots fine using yaboot version 1.3.16-4. >> The G5 I’m doing tests on is using yaboot version 1.3.17-4. > > When was that machine installed? February 5, 2017, using the Jessie installer available at the time. It’s running more or less stock Jessie powerpc. One of the links [1] Frank gave for the ext4 problem indicated that it was a 64-bit feature in ext4 that yaboot couldn’t cope with. It also talked about disabling that feature for 64-bit powerpc until it could be fixed. Could be relevant? [1] https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=825110#67 > In this context, I just found this commit [2] which added the /boot > partition. Note the > additional "$defaultignore{}" designation which apparently means the > partition is not > created in all cases. In light of the above, it seems that it should not be ignored by default. >> One other thought: A single MB for the HFS partition may be too small if we >> want to >> support both grub and yaboot at the same time. How about 2MB (or even 10? — >> disk >> space is cheap). > > Again, please write that down and let's resolve that later. It's very easy to > change > the partition sizes and we can do that. However, it's more important to get > the > basic partitioning fixed first. Understood. > > Adrian Rick