On 06/02 2023 06:25 Ben Westover wrote:
It turns out that adding &device; alone is not enough since it refers to only the drive and not the partition along with it. &device;:&partition; is what was actually needed. Fixed script is attached.
Wow. Thanks. On my Power Mac G5, &device; alone always worked. Strange. One thing that concerns me a bit is putting Linux's CHRP boot script into /System/Library/CoreServices/BootX, which is specific to Mac OS X. Why is this necessary? On my Macs, with my personal installations, I tend to install more than one Mac OS (X). Each OS version has its own partition (including "Classic"), and its own blessed files/folders. Mac OS X uses /System/Library/CoreServices/BootX while Mac OS (up to 9.2.2) uses "System Folder". To me it makes sense to not copy what other OSes do. So, for Linux I use more than one partition as it has always been the way, even on x86. That's why, for my installations, I create an Apple_Boot (or Apple_Bootstrap) partition just for Linux. It has my "stage1", my CHRP boot script (along with a shiny icon) and my GRUB along with my initial 1st stage GRUB configuration. Why do I prefer this? Because now, the CHRP script will be able to rely on &device; (and &partition;) to identify itself, while I use GRUB on this partition to find my actual Linux boot partition (which may or may not be the same as the root partition). This is possible because GRUB supports finding partitions and (Linux) filesystems based on their UUIDs rather than specifying fixed disk/partition numbers. AFAIK GRUB supports a wide range of filesystems, including ext2/3/4, HFS, HFS+, VFAT, exFAT, btrfs, ZFS, and XFS. So my Linux root / and my Linux boot /boot can be on a partition of any of those filesystems and GRUB will find it based on the UUID I have it look for. Now I can change the partition table without causing any damage to the boot process, because a) my Linux HFS Apple_Boot partition contains a blessed CHRP boot script, making it visible to the OS Picker, and b) the included GRUB will look for the boot partition (and its 2nd-stage i.e. real grub.cfg) UUID-based. Apple_Boot --> CHRP boot script --> GRUB --> initial grub.cfg --> /boot (found based on UUID) --> loads /grub/grub.cfg from it So my real grub.cfg is on my /boot partition, which isn't the HFS Apple_Boot partition, and which has a filesystem that suits Linux much more than HFS, in my case ext4. My /boot contains grub.cfg, all the different Linux kernels and the initramfs files. Naturally, this grub.cfg now also supports booting anything else, should that work on PowerPC, like booting *BSD (NetBSD?) and XNU (Mac OS X, but as stated here before, PowerPC XNU booting isn't really working). The desired result: whatever I do, I can always rely on the OS Picker to get me a working installation of either Mac OS (both X and Classic) as well as Linux (more than one distribution/installation, if need be), even after removing a (i.e. Mac OS X) partition in front of the Apple_Boot and /boot partitions... The real reason for requiring the separate Apple_Boot(strap) HFS partition for Linux is that OF doesn't support the filesystem Linux uses for /boot, as well as the other way around: the filesystem wouldn't support blessing. So, yes, we could also use /System/Library/CoreServices/BootX as the CHRP boot script path + filename, but why should we? For Open Firmware this doesn't do anything at all, because OF only cares if a folder/file is blessed or not... Anyway, thanks for your work!
