On Sun, Oct 19, 2003 at 12:31:15PM -0700, Chris Tillman wrote: > On Sun, Oct 19, 2003 at 11:29:38AM +0200, Sven Luther wrote: > > Hello, > > > > In order to continue work on making debian-installer subarch friendly, i > > now launch a second round of investigation concerning the way different > > subarches boot. The situation as i understand it is : > > > > newpmac: uses yaboot (uncompressed kernel + separate initrd) or OF > > (.coff kernel, don't know about initrd). Debian-installer will boot with > > yaboot, and the CDrom can be made to be auto-bootable, altough i don't > > know how. > > The bootability of the CD is taken care of by mkisofs. It gives the > CD an HFS 'blessing' which makes it bootable, and it boots according > to the ofboot.b script which yaboot supplies.
Ok, altough i will let this part of it to the newpmac DDs working on debian-installer. > We have tried to avoid getting users into OF in the past, probably > because it's hard to provide Forth-based support in an installation > manual. I don't know how .coff booting works either. :)) > > oldpmac: uses bootx, miboot, quik or serial console OF. OF uses the > > .coff kernel, don't know about initrd. miboot uses floopy for kernel > > (compressed) and initrd. bootx can use a kernel and separate initrd, and > > quik cannot be used for cdrom boot. It is said that it is possible to > > use miboot to cdrom boot or ssomething such, but i have not confirmed > > these rumors. debian-installer will be installable from either bootx > > (uncompressed kernel + separate initrd) altough we will not provide > > bootx on the CD, or miboot (two or more floppy images). > > We do provide BootX in the archive now, it should still be on the CD. > But it's there as a Stuffit archive; it's not usable directly from the > CD and must be installed on the user's hard disk. Someone said > mkisofs could put BootX on the CD as a double-clickable MacOS > application, but I'm skeptical. If it could, then the kernels could > also be placed in the same folder with BootX, and BootX might find > them. This would be great. Let's try to do this, and a similar thing could be done for apus also. > > 3) We build the kernel as part of the debian-installer build system, > > and can thus use a specific configuration, possibly even many of them, > > one of them being specialized for miboot and its 1.3Mo kernel size > > requirement, and build the kernel udebs from that. > > This is the solution that prep used in boot-floppies. It was > problematic to be building kernels within the installer build. I don't > have any better ideas though. So prep also needs kernel + builtin initrd ? The boot-floppies kernel where somewhat built by hand anyway, as i remember, so this caused less problems here. I will modify Goswin's debian-installer build scripts to build the kernel by hand then. Maybe we could use a adapted kernel config there, no need to build the full kernel. Not sure though. I would need someone knowledgeable with miboot to stuff the resulting compressed vmlinux and miboot on a floppy though. Friendly, Sven Luther
