On 09/26/2017 05:12 PM, Milan Kupcevic wrote: > I would say abandon yaboot ASAP. We could keep it on life support for > the sake of making installer images bootable and for easier transition > of Mac machines to Grub.
I fully agree. > That said, if not done already, creation of bootable iso images should > also transition from Yaboot to Grub. That's not been done yet, unfortunately. I want to tackle the installation of GRUB onto the target system first. > The 1MB HFS partition on Mac machines, which holds yaboot binary and > which gets marked as bootable (blessed in Apple lingo) by yaboot tools > is too small for grub. You have to make it larger, make sure installer > puts grub binary in it and have it "blessed with holy penguin pee" (in > yaboot lingo). Then work out grub bugs, if any are left, and you are all > set. > > You should still be able to put yaboot in that larger HFS partition. So, > as partitioning goes bumping the HFS partition size up would be the > right thing to do. Ok, so I guess the first step would be to patch partman-auto to increase the size of the bootloader partition for all sub-architectures. Question: Does GRUB work on all the PowerPC variants that Yaboot supports? According to [1], Yaboot supports: - Mac Newworld, CHRP, CHRP/RS6000, CHRP_IBM and Cell. Are these all supported by GRUB? If yes, the transition won't break anything. I don't know what platforms like Oldworld use though. I assume they are booted from Penguin from MacOS? > Just for the sake of mentioning this, it is also possible to create > vmlinuz kernel image using mkvmlinuz and put it in that HFS partition, > bless it and let the firmware load the kernel directly with no boot > loader involved at all. Ok. But I guess I prefer GRUB whenever possible? >> I'm still a bit undecided about the ext4 issue with Yaboot. I actually >> would tend to always use the ext2 /boot partitions for all installations >> and revert the work-around used for partman-ext3. > > Yaboot is able to read ext4 partitions formatted with e2fsprogs1.41 and > earlier. Disabling the features added in later ext4 versions in > installer is a temporary workaround that is not sustainable as Ted keeps > adding those newer features quite regularly. Yeah, lets not open this particular can of worms :). So, do we all agree that the first thing is to increase the size of the bootloader partitions for the aforementioned systems? Patches are welcome in any case. I have, as said before, full commit access to debian-installer and its components, so getting the changes merged won't take too long. Adrian > [1] > https://anonscm.debian.org/cgit/d-i/yaboot-installer.git/tree/debian/control -- .''`. John Paul Adrian Glaubitz : :' : Debian Developer - glaub...@debian.org `. `' Freie Universitaet Berlin - glaub...@physik.fu-berlin.de `- GPG: 62FF 8A75 84E0 2956 9546 0006 7426 3B37 F5B5 F913
