On 10/01/2017 11:00 AM, Rick Thomas wrote:> 1) I did a test installation
with manual partitioning using the 20170927 installer (Debian GNU/Linux
9.0 _Sid_ - Unofficial ppc64 NETINST 20170925-19:46). I created a 10MB
bootstrap HFS partition and a 250MB /boot ext2 partition. It had no
problem installing yaboot to the 10MB HFS partition, and no trouble
booting from it using that yaboot. So we can say that it is possible to
use an HFS partition as large as that with yaboot. Whether it works
with grub2 is a question for another day.
I recently stumbled upon [1] which mentions an "8M" limit (either 8 MB
or 8 MiB) for the PReP partition which holds the stage1 binary - most
likely yaboot or grub - for IBM POWER machines.
[1]:
https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/community/wikis/home?lang=en#!/wiki/W51a7ffcf4dfd_4b40_9d82_446ebc23c550/page/PowerLinux%20Boot%20howto
This is also reflected in the current partman recipes for
"powerpc-chrp_ibm" and "powerpc-prep" (and respective ppc64 targets) on [2]:
Example:
root/recipes-powerpc-chrp_ibm/atomic
```
[...]
8 1 1 prep
$primary{ }
$bootable{ }
method{ prep } .
[...]
```
So maybe 8 MB/MiB as maximum size for the PReP partition could also be a
good candidate for the size of the HFS partition on Apple powerpc and
ppc64 machines.
"8 MB/MiB ought to be enough for anybody", don't you agree? ;-)
[2]: https://anonscm.debian.org/cgit/d-i/partman-auto.git/tree/
As mentioned before, I don't know how to mount this PReP partition on my
POWER5 machine. I assumed there is a VFAT FS on this partition, but
mounting it as VFAT doesn't succeed. So maybe there's no FS at all on
this partition but just a stage1 binary. Maybe it's dd'ed directly to
this partition - if someone could shed some light on this, I'd be
grateful. :-)
One other thought:
It could also be that the size of the partition is not an issue for the
firmware, but the size of the stage1 binary could be. The original 800
KB limit on Power Macs could be also to make sure, that the stage1
binary cannot be bigger than 800 KiB, which was the same size as a Mac
3.5" floppy disk according to Rogério Brito on [3].
[3]: http://cynic.cc/blog/posts/running_grub2_on_powerpc_macs/
Cheers,
Frank
