Hello! I have been working on getting the GRUB installation on PowerMacs fixed the past days which turned out to be far more tricky than I expected. As can be seen from the number of test images I have created so far [1], I have already been through quite a number of image rebuilds to get the grub-installer work correctly on PowerMac (ignore the timestamps in the folder names, the correct timestamps of the images can be seen from the creation date in the folder view).
The latest image is in the folder "hfstest-20210411-8" which I created this morning. This image is not tested yet, but it should actually work when looking at the script code itself [2] but it doesn't which is most likely attributed to a race condition. The problem is that setting the correct file properties with the hattrib tool fails at the first attempt of installing the bootloader but succeeds when just reattempting to install the bootloader from the installer menu. So far, I have not been able to find out why, that will require more debugging. If anyone wants to give it a try themselves, please fetch the image from [1] (so far I created a 32-bit image only) and see if it works for you. Note: After selecting the partition layout, the partioning tool will present an empty question dialog which should be answered with <NO>. It's a known issue I will fix later, so just ignore it for now. FWIW, I also found a number of bugs in GRUB on PowerMac itself while working on the problem. It turns out that GRUB does not set the proper openfirmware path in NVRAM pointing to the BootX script that it just installed. The script gets installed into :System:Library:CoreServices:BootX but grub-install (the upstream GRUB installation tool) just sets the path to :BootX. Also, while GRUB's grub-install blesses the "CoreServices" folder, it does not set the "tbxi" attribute which means it's not possible to boot the disk with "boot hd:N,:\\tbxi" (N being the partition). And, finally, GRUB's grub-install never substitutes the variable names "device" and "partition" in the boot script [3] it installs. They just remain as is on the disk which naturally means that grub-install currently cannot itself properly install GRUB on a PowerMac which is obviously a bug. Adrian > [1] https://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/ports/tests/ > [2] https://people.debian.org/~glaubitz/grub-installer.20210414 > [3] > http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/grub.git/tree/grub-core/boot/powerpc/grub.chrp.in -- .''`. 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
