Hi Karl,
On 2/26/19 17:34, Carlos wrote:
Hello Adrian,
when you are talking about GRUB, are you talking about GRUB2?
Are you aware of this page?
http://cynic.cc/blog/posts/running_grub2_on_powerpc_macs/
I just found this page. Don’t know if this helps your development.
Let me answer for Adrian and hopefully clarify things a little. :-)
It's out of the question that GRUB2 (nowadays often referred to as just
GRUB) works on NewWorld Power Macs and also POWER based machines (which
are also in the scope of this list). We tested GRUB successfully on many
NewWorld Power Macs from the Blue & White G3 to the 11,2 type G5 (also
incl. Slot Load Xserve G4 and G5) - IIRC actually using the method from
the URL you mentioned above. We also confirmed that it works on POWER
based machines down to POWER5. All that already in 2017 IIRC.
The issue we still have is that we do not yet have an implementation for
the d-i/grub-installer (the "package" that actually installs GRUB during
a Debian installation) that does successfully install GRUB on NewWorld
Power Macs. We have such an implementation for POWER based machines though.
But the NewWorld Power Mac specifics for booting a machine are a little
more complex. The usual way is to put a boot loader like GRUB on a HFS
partition (the NewWorld bootstrap partition) from which the firmware can
load and start it. But as there is no "full" support (i.e. file system
handling) for HFS in the partitioning step of the Debian installation,
we need to implement the file system handling for HFS in addition. And
we also have to take care not to scuttle the support for other
architectures in d-i/grub-installer. All that takes time for development
and testing. Not enough we also need to be able to fix the bootstrap
partition during runtime, e.g. in case of FS errors, which is currently
broken for G5s with 64 bit userland but also being worked on. So in time
we will get all this working.
****
Everything written above was also already posted to this list some time
ago, so it's strongly recommended to check the list archive ([1]) - for
maybe the last two years or so. :-) Yes, I know, that's a lot of stuff,
but it will give the reader a profound background and a much better
understanding of the topics on this list.
[1]: https://lists.debian.org/debian-powerpc/
Cheers,
Frank
