Re: debian-installer: please default to grub-ieee1275 on powerpc instead of yaboot

[John Paul Adrian Glaubitz]

On 09/21/2017 04:32 PM, Lennart Sorensen wrote:
> Well in the case of IBM power systems, you use a DOS MBR partition scheme
> and you create a Prep boot partition, which should be 1MB or so in size,
> and grub is installed there as a raw image.  Has been working fine for
> a while as far as I have been able to tell.

Ok, good to know. What about GPT partition tables? On ppc64el, i.e. POWER8
and newer, the default labels are all GPT. Any idea which is the earliest
POWER5+ machine which supports GPT or should we just assume MS-DOS
partition tabels for all POWER machines?

> The grub modules stay in whatever /boot is on, and the grub image
> generated contains enough of grub to read filesystems and is loaded
> by the firmware from the prep boot partition (it litterally reads that
> partition into ram as raw data, and executes it). 

Interesting. Do you know whether the mechanism is the same? My worries
are that users on older PowerPC hardware, especially Apple Macintosh
would have to go through extra lengths to get this working.

It seems that openSUSE for ppc and ppc64 always seems to default to
GRUB.

Could someone with both 32-bit and 64-bit Macs maybe perform test
installations of openSUSE on their machines?

> http://download.opensuse.org/ports/ppc/tumbleweed/iso/

The latest release for 32-bit powerpc seems to be 11.1:

> http://mirrors.vbi.vt.edu/linux/opensuse/discontinued/distribution/11.1/iso/

You can also test other distributions like Fedora, for example. Latest
version with ppc32 support seems to be 12:

> https://archives.fedoraproject.org/pub/archive/fedora/linux/releases/12/Fedora/ppc/iso/

The more test results we have, the better. If it turns out that GRUB will
even work properly on 32-bit PowerPC machines, I think it would be the
best option to make GRUB default for "powerpc" as well.

Of course, we can still keep yaboot on the FTP archives. It will not
be a potential source of issues anymore, however.

Adrian

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