Re: [Sisuite-devel] PPC PReP Boot partition?

[Brian Finley]

On Mon, 2002-09-09 at 07:15, Sean Dague wrote:
> On Sun, Sep 08, 2002 at 10:50:13PM -0500, Brian Finley wrote:
> > Sean,
> > 
> > What is the filesystem type used on this partition?  Is it a standard
> > FAT?
> 
> Eventually what happens is the kernel/ramdisk is dded to this partition
> (there is no filesystem on it per say.)  Openfirmware detects type 41
> partitions, and uses them as the possible location of boot kernels when it
> brings up the box.  Because it is detected PRE OS boot, the type of the
> partition is really important.

On a running system, what do you get with a "parted /dev/sda print"?

>  
> > Unfortunately, the version of parted that we are currently using doesn't
> > allow you to specify arbitrary partition types, and the current list of
> > supported types does not include 41, as you have discovered.
> > 
> > My guess is that unless a newer version of parted is available, that
> > includes support for arbitrary partition types (I believe this was being
> > considered), we will need to set this partition type outside of parted.
> 
> Any idea how recently or heavily this was being considered?  It would be
> really nice to have this function there.

Yes.  Don't really know.  I just checked the site, and there's a new
release, 1.6.3, but unfortunately, I don't think Andrew currently
considers this an urgent issue.

> 
> > This means that until parted adds this support, we may need to include
> > sfdisk in the boel_binaries_tarball in PPC builds just for setting this
> > partition type.
> >
> > Here's what the usage should look like:
> > 
> > 
> >     sfdisk --change-id /dev/sda 1      41
> > 
> >       or
> > 
> >     sfdisk --change-id $disk    $minor 41
> 
> Ok, that solutions looks feasable in the short term.  However, in the long
> term we are going to have to abstract out the disk partitioning tool
> altogether, as Linux/s390 has its own partitioning tool for DASD (fdasd).

Ok.  Then, I think we should proceed with the sfdisk solution above.

-Brian



> 
>       -Sean
> 
> -- 
> _______________________________________________________________________
>                               
> Sean Dague                address@hidden               http://dague.net
> 
> There is no silver bullet.  Plus, werewolves make better neighbors than
> zombies, and they tend to keep the vampire population down.
> _______________________________________________________________________
-- 
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 Brian Elliott Finley  http://baldguysoftware.com/
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