Regression on powerpc-ieee2375

[Jordi Mallach]

Hi,

I've found some time to try to find out a small time gap where the
following bug was introduced.

I had a January or early February snapshot of grub installed in my Apple
PowerBook. Installing it involves working around some problems, most
notably grub-probe not liking that my boot device is called "hd" and not
"hd0" in Apple's OpenFirmware. This makes grub-install unusable,
although grub-mkdevicemap does write a correct file.

To install, I need to copy the mod files to my bootstrap partition
manually, create the core image and modify the correctly generated
device.map so it reads "(hd0) /dev/hda" instead of "(hd) /dev/hda".
After this, update-grub generates a grub.cfg, which I then need to
correct back to "hd,X" values, and then I can boot.

The other day I installed a recent grub snapshot, version 1.96+20080408-1,
and grub stopped being able to boot Linux.

The menu loads correctly, and when an entry gets selected, I get:

Booting Debian GNU/Linux, linux 2.6.25-rc8-powerpc (single-user mode)
Invalid memory access a t %SRR0:  00139d4    %SRR1: 00003030 load-size=5a474 
adler32=50409797

and am dropped to an OF prompt.

I've found out the last version that works is 1.96+20080219-2, with
latest changelog entry:


2008-02-19  Robert Millan  <address@hidden>

        * partmap/gpt.c: Include `<grub/gpt_partition.h>'.
        (grub_gpt_partition_type_empty): Redefine with macro from
        `<grub/gpt_partition.h>'.
        (gpt_partition_map_iterate): Adjust partition type comparison.

        [...]

The next Debian version available is 20080228-1, with the following
changelog entry:

2008-02-28  Robert Millan  <address@hidden>

        * conf/i386-linuxbios.rmk (pkglib_MODULES): Add aout.mod.
        (aout_mod_SOURCES): New variable.
        (aout_mod_CFLAGS): Likewise.
        (aout_mod_LDFLAGS): Likewise.

        * conf/i386-ieee1275.rmk: Likewise.

Does anyone have an educated guess of what commit could have broken
powerpc? I'm more or less available for testing, when I have the laptop
with me, and can be contacted on IRC as well.

I mentioned the grub-probe "(hd)" problem back in February, but I don't
remember reaching any conclusion on what the correct behaviour should
be. I think Pavel suggested that grub translated these unusual device
names to add a number between OF and grub, but that's all I can
remember. Any help to get grub-probe functional on Apple would be cool.

Jordi
-- 
Jordi Mallach Pérez  --  Debian developer     http://www.debian.org/
address@hidden     address@hidden     http://www.sindominio.net/
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