On 09/21/2017 04:32 PM, Lennart Sorensen wrote: > Well in the case of IBM power systems, you use a DOS MBR partition scheme > and you create a Prep boot partition, which should be 1MB or so in size, > and grub is installed there as a raw image. Has been working fine for > a while as far as I have been able to tell.
Ok, good to know. What about GPT partition tables? On ppc64el, i.e. POWER8 and newer, the default labels are all GPT. Any idea which is the earliest POWER5+ machine which supports GPT or should we just assume MS-DOS partition tabels for all POWER machines? > The grub modules stay in whatever /boot is on, and the grub image > generated contains enough of grub to read filesystems and is loaded > by the firmware from the prep boot partition (it litterally reads that > partition into ram as raw data, and executes it). Interesting. Do you know whether the mechanism is the same? My worries are that users on older PowerPC hardware, especially Apple Macintosh would have to go through extra lengths to get this working. It seems that openSUSE for ppc and ppc64 always seems to default to GRUB. Could someone with both 32-bit and 64-bit Macs maybe perform test installations of openSUSE on their machines? > http://download.opensuse.org/ports/ppc/tumbleweed/iso/ The latest release for 32-bit powerpc seems to be 11.1: > http://mirrors.vbi.vt.edu/linux/opensuse/discontinued/distribution/11.1/iso/ You can also test other distributions like Fedora, for example. Latest version with ppc32 support seems to be 12: > https://archives.fedoraproject.org/pub/archive/fedora/linux/releases/12/Fedora/ppc/iso/ The more test results we have, the better. If it turns out that GRUB will even work properly on 32-bit PowerPC machines, I think it would be the best option to make GRUB default for "powerpc" as well. Of course, we can still keep yaboot on the FTP archives. It will not be a potential source of issues anymore, however. Adrian -- .''`. 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
