On 16/04/2021 07:47, John Paul Adrian Glaubitz wrote:
On 4/16/21 8:36 AM, Mark Cave-Ayland wrote:
Your machine is obviously not detected as a New World PowerMac and thus, none
of the mechanisms for
New World PowerMacs are applied. If archdetect doesn't show you're on a
"powerpc/powermac_newworld",
neither the automatic partioning nor the installation of GRUB for PowerMacs is
triggered correctly.
I see, thanks - my confusion was that the old installer used to always set up
the partitioning regardless
of the machine type and so it was possible to boot on both an Old World and a
New World machine.
That's not quite true. The installer has always been differentiating the
different machine types on
PowerPC. For Yaboot, there was a package called "partman-newworld" before that
was only enabled on
machines detected as */powermac_newworld. If your machine did not match that
pattern, it would not
have created the HFS bootstrap.
I see. Possibly this is a bit blurred under QEMU since whilst the machine types
should be reported correctly, OpenBIOS is able to run a New World bootloader on an
Old World machine.
Are Old World Macs no longer supported?
I am currently concerned with New World Macs only as I haven't had the time yet
to dig out an OW
Mac for testing. I have such a machine currently in storage but no plans at the
moment to work
on it as kernel support for these old machines as mine (PowerBook 3400) is not
working anyway
at the moment.
Ah ok. My guess is that assuming grub is fairly conservative with its CIF usage then
the main change would be to set the tbxi attribute on
System/Library/CoreServices/grub.elf instead of System/Library/CoreServices/BootX. My
hunch is that Old World machines can't parse an XML CHRP-BOOT script, but they should
be able to load the ELF directly (which is effectively what I did during my
installation test).
So, I thought setting the filetype isn't necessary?
I think it shouldn't be - I can test later but mostly I just wanted to use
something that was
known to work so I could debug the boot process.
My question still is: Why does "grub-install --macppc-directory=/boot/grub" not
already set up
a completely working bootstrap partition. There is obviously a bug in
grub-install.
Yeah. When I did my test the grub-install section of the installer itself didn't
report any errors, but then I didn't go looking at the installer logs directly.
Perhaps that's something to do for the next test once I've validated the creation of
the /boot/grub HFS partition on New World machines.
ATB,
Mark.
