Hi Stan! Apologies for the late reply!
On Tue, 2023-05-02 at 12:35 -0600, Stan Johnson wrote: > On 5/2/23 7:24 AM, John Paul Adrian Glaubitz wrote: > > ... > > > > The former issue could be resolved if someone could find out how to boot > > a PowerPC Mac from a FAT32 boot partition. It's supposed to work but I never > > verified that. > > > > If someone could test that, I can implement that and we won't have to resort > > to HFS which causes some headache since the APSL license of hfsprogs is > > considered non-free by Debian. > > ... > > On a PowerMac G5, I tested vfat, fat, and ext2 for the Apple_Bootstrap > partition, but none of those worked (the system would just boot from the > first Apple_HFS partition and ignore Apple_Bootstrap altogether). I > thought I read once that Apple's Open Firmware understood ext2 volumes, > but maybe it was Apple's UFS that it could read, not ext2 (and I didn't > test Apple UFS, since I didn't see a "mkfs.ufs" in Debian and it would > likely have the same issues as HFS, anyway). Looking at the official documentation [1], it should work: > New World machines (with OF 3.0+) support HFS+, ISO9660, and FAT. When > Mac OS X is installed on an HFS+ volume, BootX is typically placed > in the /System/Library/CoreServices directory, and given the HFS+ > type attribute of 'tbxi'. Furthermore, the CoreServices folder is > "blessed", which means that it's directory ID (analogous to an inum > in FFS terminology) is recorded, in the HFS+ volume header. I just don't know how to bless a bootloader located on a FAT partition. I know that xorriso does it and it works on ISO9660 filesystems, but I don't understand how. Again, if someone could figure out how it's done, it would make the bootloader situation on Apple PowerMac much better. Or someone points me to a version of hfsprogs which is covered by the GPL. Adrian > [1] https://github.com/apple-oss-distributions/bless/blob/main/README.BOOTING -- .''`. John Paul Adrian Glaubitz : :' : Debian Developer `. `' Physicist `- GPG: 62FF 8A75 84E0 2956 9546 0006 7426 3B37 F5B5 F913
