Hello Stuart, On Fri, 2025-04-11 at 17:58 +1200, Stuart MacIntosh wrote: > On 11/04/25 17:08, John Paul Adrian Glaubitz wrote: > > Sounds like an incompatibility with the current grub-ieee1275 on Apple > > PowerMac. > > This is currently my best guess, but I want to be certain! I skimmed the > archives of this list and it seems to have been reported before (sorry > for the duplicate report). The OFW on Macs with screens is apparently > built with more creature comforts, like 'press any key to continue' > which could have misled.
I don't remember similar reports with GRUB on PowerMac G4 or G5, so I think you're the first user to report this. > > > Manually booting such as with "boot hd:,\\grub" returns a "CLAIM failed" > > > error. I'd be grateful for any troubleshooting tips. > > > > > > Has anyone else run into this issue? Should I try rebuilding grub and/or > > > the kernel myself? > > > Not yet, but I haven't performed a dist-upgrade on my PowerBook G4 yet which > > I am using for these tests. I will try to do that over the next days and > > see if I can reproduce this. > > For clarity this is the G5: uniprocessor *M9743LL/A configuration, IBM > *970FX, but I figure it's the same GRUB2 build?In any case beware of > rebooting after the dist-upgrade! ;-) Yes, I'm aware that XServe machines are 64 bit while my G4 is 32 bit. However, I don't think the firmware being used is too different. My suspicion is that there was some recent change in the IEEE-1275 GRUB code by IBM engineers. We're seeing such regressions from time to time everywhere in the PowerPC ports as IBM engineers don't really care about support for older PowerPC hardware. > > > An excerpt from the OFW console is attached. I even checked the space > > > weather because for 3 machines to fail at once like this, it's either > > > software or a solar flare :-) > > > > I think it would be wise to report this to the grub-devel upstream mailing > > list [1] and see if you can get any feedback. The background is that Debian > > backports upstream changes from time to time and I could imagine that some > > of the recent PowerPC-related changes may have broken your machine. > > > > Do you happen to know what the last working grub-ieee1275 version was? > > > > > [1] https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/grub-devel/ > > > > > > > Already done! > > https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?67012 Good. > FWIW there is a ppc64el patch in the Debian GRUB2 sources, but unsure if > that's related at all. I'd guess not because it's for little endian? > > https://sources.debian.org/patches/grub2/2.12-7/ppc64el-disable-vsx.patch/ That patch is more than 11 years old, so I don't think it's the cause of your problem. Also, that patch actually disables VSX which would make the code more and not less compatible with older PowerPC CPUs. Adrian -- .''`. John Paul Adrian Glaubitz : :' : Debian Developer `. `' Physicist `- GPG: 62FF 8A75 84E0 2956 9546 0006 7426 3B37 F5B5 F913
