Re: Maturity of GRUB on powerpc/ppc64?

[John Paul Adrian Glaubitz]

On 10/04/2017 12:41 PM, Frank Scheiner wrote:
> On 10/04/2017 10:50 AM, John Paul Adrian Glaubitz wrote:
> > On 10/02/2017 05:04 PM, Frank Scheiner wrote:
> > > As a follow-up to [1] but maybe better placed under the subject of this thread,
> > > the promised details for the Grub installation on an Xserve G4 with Debian Sid.
> >
> > Thanks. Is there any specify reason why you aren't using grub-install?
>
> Yes - it's a known working method. I know that it worked that way on the Power 
> Mac G5,
> so I first tried it that way on the Xserve G4. That to be sure no errors are 
> introduced
> by another method of installation.

I understand. But please understand that we want to integrate the GRUB 
installation
into debian-installer using the grub-installer script [1]. Thus, we should not
deviate too much from the installation mechanism used on other architectures.

> > If I remember correctly, most of the steps you went through above should
> > actually be performed by single invocation of grub-install which is what
> > debian-installer is doing as well.
>
> I can retry this on the G5 with an installer that has Grub included. IIRC that
> wasn't the case, the last time I installed the G5 in late September (with the
> installer ISO with SHA256 hash: 
> 46844b4c8da76c3fb18d3d350b1262b9938c8b8ff8a85bd193d76ac7e33b5dc9)
> - or I just didn't notice it.

Please be aware that the option to install GRUB is already there but it's not
run by debian-installer by default because the Yaboot installation option is
higher in the menu and therefore has a higher priority. And the moment a 
bootloader
has been installed, debian-installer will skip any other options for bootloader
installation afterwards.

Thus, after the installation has finished, you have to go back to the 
installer's
main menu and choose the GRUB option to install it. You will most likely have
to manually adjust the partitioning and then mount the HFS boot partition
to /boot/grub.

> And I can also try to use grub-install on the Xserve G4 from the already 
> installed OS.
> If there is also a Sid installer image available for powerpc I can also do that 
> from
> the Debian installer.

The powerpc images are always built in [2] as previously mentioned. 
Unfortunately,
the image there is already 6 days old which means it won't have the necessary
grub-installer package 1.143 yet. If the image won't show up there until 
tomorrow,
I can manually build one as well.

Adrian

> [1] https://anonscm.debian.org/git/d-i/grub-installer.git/tree/grub-installer
> [2] http://jenkins.kfreebsd.eu/jenkins/view/cd/

--
 .''`.  John Paul Adrian Glaubitz
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`. `'   Freie Universitaet Berlin - address@hidden
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