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

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

[John Paul Adrian Glaubitz]

Hi!

I would help with this transition to use GRUB on powerpc as well
as on ppc64 which we are now providing unofficial installation
for in Debian Ports [1].

I do have commit access to debian-installer and its components
as well as access to an IBM POWER7 instance which can be used
to test both powerpc as well as ppc64 installation images.

I would like to get rid of yaboot because it is no longer maintained
upstream and switching to GRUB also helps reduce the maintenance
burden in debian-installer.

What we need are people who are willing to extensively test d-i
images with GRUB on powerpc and ppc64 and report back. Also, I'm
not yet sure whether I have understood how exactly GRUB is properly
configured and used on powerpc and ppc64.

Adrian

-- 
  .''`.  John Paul Adrian Glaubitz
: :' :  Debian Developer - glaubitz@debian.org
`. `'   Freie Universitaet Berlin - glaubitz@physik.fu-berlin.de
   `-    GPG: 62FF 8A75 84E0 2956 9546  0006 7426 3B37 F5B5 F913

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

[Frank Scheiner]

On 09/21/2017 02:21 PM, John Paul Adrian Glaubitz wrote:
> [...]
> What we need are people who are willing to extensively test d-i
> images with GRUB on powerpc and ppc64 and report back.

I can offer to test with all sorts of Power Mac G4s and an Xserve G4 for 
powerpc. I still need to buy a few CD-RWs though. :-)

  Also, I'm
> not yet sure whether I have understood how exactly GRUB is properly
> configured and used on powerpc and ppc64.

(1) Mathieu's pointer to [1] (with Grub's expectations) came a little 
too late for me and the howto I provided on [2].

(2) It looks like Rogério Brito on [3] wanted to make sure that his Grub 
installation also works with what yaboot "dictated" during installation 
(e.g. 800 KB HFS partition, etc.).

I'm unsure what the best approach would be. Assuming that on updates to 
Grub a new grub.img needs to be created, with approach (2) only a single 
file needs to be copied to the HFS partition. With approach (1) I 
actually don't know if the HFS partition will contain all the Grub 
modules in addition. But approach (1) seems to be the "default" for Grub 
and most likely the shipped tools also have the same expectations.

[1]: https://bugs.debian.org/691207

[2]: https://lists.debian.org/debian-powerpc/2017/09/msg00034.html

[3]: http://cynic.cc/blog/posts/running_grub2_on_powerpc_macs/

Cheers,
Frank

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

[Daniel Kahn Gillmor]

On Thu 2017-09-21 14:21:52 +0200, John Paul Adrian Glaubitz wrote:

> I would help with this transition to use GRUB on powerpc as well
> as on ppc64 which we are now providing unofficial installation
> for in Debian Ports [1].
>
> I do have commit access to debian-installer and its components
> as well as access to an IBM POWER7 instance which can be used
> to test both powerpc as well as ppc64 installation images.
>
> I would like to get rid of yaboot because it is no longer maintained
> upstream and switching to GRUB also helps reduce the maintenance
> burden in debian-installer.
>
> What we need are people who are willing to extensively test d-i
> images with GRUB on powerpc and ppc64 and report back. Also, I'm
> not yet sure whether I have understood how exactly GRUB is properly
> configured and used on powerpc and ppc64.

I like this idea but i don't have a lot of spare machines handy to try
d-i on these days.  I can try to dig up a power supply for an idle older
ppc laptop i've got floating around, but i don't know whether i'll be
able to find it.

sorry to not be more help.  it'd be great to be able to drop yaboot.

     --dkg

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

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Thu, Sep 21, 2017 at 02:49:53PM +0200, Frank Scheiner wrote:
> On 09/21/2017 02:21 PM, John Paul Adrian Glaubitz wrote:
> > [...]
> > What we need are people who are willing to extensively test d-i
> > images with GRUB on powerpc and ppc64 and report back.
> 
> I can offer to test with all sorts of Power Mac G4s and an Xserve G4 for
> powerpc. I still need to buy a few CD-RWs though. :-)
> 
>  Also, I'm
> > not yet sure whether I have understood how exactly GRUB is properly
> > configured and used on powerpc and ppc64.
> 
> (1) Mathieu's pointer to [1] (with Grub's expectations) came a little too
> late for me and the howto I provided on [2].
> 
> (2) It looks like Rogério Brito on [3] wanted to make sure that his Grub
> installation also works with what yaboot "dictated" during installation
> (e.g. 800 KB HFS partition, etc.).
> 
> I'm unsure what the best approach would be. Assuming that on updates to Grub
> a new grub.img needs to be created, with approach (2) only a single file
> needs to be copied to the HFS partition. With approach (1) I actually don't
> know if the HFS partition will contain all the Grub modules in addition. But
> approach (1) seems to be the "default" for Grub and most likely the shipped
> tools also have the same expectations.
> 
> [1]: https://bugs.debian.org/691207
> 
> [2]: https://lists.debian.org/debian-powerpc/2017/09/msg00034.html
> 
> [3]: http://cynic.cc/blog/posts/running_grub2_on_powerpc_macs/

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.  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).  This is why the prep boot partition has to be large
enough to hold whatever the grub image with required starting modules
needs.

-- 
Len Sorensen

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

[Daniel Kahn Gillmor]

On Thu 2017-09-21 10:26:08 -0400, Daniel Kahn Gillmor wrote:
> I like this idea but i don't have a lot of spare machines handy to try
> d-i on these days.  I can try to dig up a power supply for an idle older
> ppc laptop i've got floating around, but i don't know whether i'll be
> able to find it.

I should mention: i currently run (and have run in the past) many
powerpc systems (old Mac hardware, mainly, running an OpenFirmware forth
shell from the mainboard), all of which i either directly installed with
grub (via debootstrap from debirf) or converted from yaboot to grub.
I've yet to find one (even a really old blue clamshell iBook with 64MiB
of RAM) that grub didn't work for me on in the end.  So for the machines
i've dealt with, the question is more about d-i integration than about
whether grub will work or not.

I do note that there have been some interesting endianness issues
(e.g. channel-swap, or palette inversion) with the colorspace when
trying to use grub's graphical mode (but i've seen similar issues with
non-grub stuff as well).  I don't know how much we care in this
discussion about grub's graphical capabilities, as compared to its
booting capabilities.

yaboot had no graphical capabilities at all, iirc.

          --dkg

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

-- 
 .''`.  John Paul Adrian Glaubitz
: :' :  Debian Developer - glaubitz@debian.org
`. `'   Freie Universitaet Berlin - glaubitz@physik.fu-berlin.de
  `-    GPG: 62FF 8A75 84E0 2956 9546  0006 7426 3B37 F5B5 F913

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

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Thu, Sep 21, 2017 at 06:26:10PM +0200, John Paul Adrian Glaubitz wrote:
> 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?

I unfortunately never tried GPT on any IBM power machines and I no longer
have access to them.

I found this:

http://download.boulder.ibm.com/ibmdl/pub/software/server/firmware/AH-Firmware-Hist.html

So it claims that on power7 the firmware upgrade in 2013 added support
for booting from a GPT disk.  So to me that means a lot of power7 systems
out there won't be able to (since not everyone has updated the firmware).
It doesn't say what you have to create as a boot partition when using
GPT though, so no idea how one would use it.  It might support FAT32
filesystem and accessing the grub file the way UEFI systems do, and
similar to what I think PowerMac machines do.

I can't find anything to suggest any power6 or power5 system ever had
an update to allow it.

I would expect all power8 machines had GPT support from the start,
and hence defaulting to that makes sense.

> > 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.

On a powermac is is certainly different.  You would have an apple
partition table instead, along with whatever else a mac requires boot wise
(which I don't know off hand).

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

Makes sense, since it is a nice boot loader.

> 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.

i386 offered lilo as an alternative to grub for quite a while in the
installer.

-- 
Len Sorensen

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

[Daniel Kahn Gillmor]

On Thu 2017-09-21 12:10:17 -0400, Daniel Kahn Gillmor wrote:
> I should mention: i currently run (and have run in the past) many
> powerpc systems (old Mac hardware, mainly, running an OpenFirmware forth
> shell from the mainboard), all of which i either directly installed with
> grub (via debootstrap from debirf) or converted from yaboot to grub.
> I've yet to find one (even a really old blue clamshell iBook with 64MiB
> of RAM) that grub didn't work for me on in the end.  So for the machines
> i've dealt with, the question is more about d-i integration than about
> whether grub will work or not.

One more note: iirc, all of these systems were using an apple-style
partition table (parted creates this type with "mklabel mac").

          --dkg

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

[John Paul Adrian Glaubitz]

On 09/21/2017 08:54 PM, Daniel Kahn Gillmor wrote:
> One more note: iirc, all of these systems were using an apple-style
> partition table (parted creates this type with "mklabel mac").

This is defined here [1] and can be easily changed if necessary.

Adrian

> [1] https://anonscm.debian.org/cgit/d-i/partman-partitioning.git/tree/lib/disk-label.sh#n53

-- 
 .''`.  John Paul Adrian Glaubitz
: :' :  Debian Developer - glaubitz@debian.org
`. `'   Freie Universitaet Berlin - glaubitz@physik.fu-berlin.de
  `-    GPG: 62FF 8A75 84E0 2956 9546  0006 7426 3B37 F5B5 F913

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

[John Paul Adrian Glaubitz]

On 09/21/2017 07:02 PM, Lennart Sorensen wrote:
> On Thu, Sep 21, 2017 at 06:26:10PM +0200, John Paul Adrian Glaubitz wrote:
>> 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?
> 
> I unfortunately never tried GPT on any IBM power machines and I no longer
> have access to them.

I have one POWER7 machine that has been provided to me by IBM for testing
purposes and to host one of our buildds. I have performed a test installation
of openSUSE Tumbleweed on it.

Here's the partitioning scheme that is being used:

(parted) p
Model: Virtio Block Device (virtblk)
Disk /dev/vda: 42.9GB
Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B
Partition Table: msdos
Disk Flags:

Number  Start   End     Size    Type     File system     Flags
 1      1049kB  2097kB  1049kB  primary                  boot, prep, type=41
 2      2097kB  2163MB  2161MB  primary  linux-swap(v1)  type=82
 3      2163MB  18.9GB  16.7GB  primary  btrfs           type=83
 4      18.9GB  42.9GB  24.0GB  primary  xfs             type=83

(parted)

Interestingly, /boot is part of the btrfs filesystem:

linux-mfl2:~ # mount | grep boot
/dev/vda3 on /boot/grub2/powerpc-ieee1275 type btrfs (rw,relatime,space_cache,subvolid=261,subvol=/@/boot/grub2/powerpc-ieee1275)
linux-mfl2:~ #

> I found this:
> 
> http://download.boulder.ibm.com/ibmdl/pub/software/server/firmware/AH-Firmware-Hist.html
> 
> So it claims that on power7 the firmware upgrade in 2013 added support
> for booting from a GPT disk.  So to me that means a lot of power7 systems
> out there won't be able to (since not everyone has updated the firmware).
> It doesn't say what you have to create as a boot partition when using
> GPT though, so no idea how one would use it.  It might support FAT32
> filesystem and accessing the grub file the way UEFI systems do, and
> similar to what I think PowerMac machines do.
> 
> I can't find anything to suggest any power6 or power5 system ever had
> an update to allow it.

Ok, so I guess we can basically rule out GPT for the default label even
on POWER systems. I would therefore then vote for using MS-DOS partition
tables on POWER systems, i.e. what is already used now.

> I would expect all power8 machines had GPT support from the start,
> and hence defaulting to that makes sense.

I agree.

>>> 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.
> 
> On a powermac is is certainly different.  You would have an apple
> partition table instead, along with whatever else a mac requires boot wise
> (which I don't know off hand).

So, MS-DOS partition tables will not work at all on a Mac, correct?

Adrian

-- 
 .''`.  John Paul Adrian Glaubitz
: :' :  Debian Developer - glaubitz@debian.org
`. `'   Freie Universitaet Berlin - glaubitz@physik.fu-berlin.de
  `-    GPG: 62FF 8A75 84E0 2956 9546  0006 7426 3B37 F5B5 F913

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

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Thu, Sep 21, 2017 at 10:37:43PM +0200, John Paul Adrian Glaubitz wrote:
> I have one POWER7 machine that has been provided to me by IBM for testing
> purposes and to host one of our buildds. I have performed a test installation
> of openSUSE Tumbleweed on it.
> 
> Here's the partitioning scheme that is being used:
> 
> (parted) p
> Model: Virtio Block Device (virtblk)
> Disk /dev/vda: 42.9GB
> Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B
> Partition Table: msdos
> Disk Flags:
> 
> Number  Start   End     Size    Type     File system     Flags
>  1      1049kB  2097kB  1049kB  primary                  boot, prep, type=41
>  2      2097kB  2163MB  2161MB  primary  linux-swap(v1)  type=82
>  3      2163MB  18.9GB  16.7GB  primary  btrfs           type=83
>  4      18.9GB  42.9GB  24.0GB  primary  xfs             type=83
> 
> (parted)
> 
> Interestingly, /boot is part of the btrfs filesystem:
> 
> linux-mfl2:~ # mount | grep boot
> /dev/vda3 on /boot/grub2/powerpc-ieee1275 type btrfs (rw,relatime,space_cache,subvolid=261,subvol=/@/boot/grub2/powerpc-ieee1275)
> linux-mfl2:~ #

Well as long as grub can read that, then no problem.  So as long as
grub-install is including btrfs support in the grub image placed in the
prep boot partition, then /boot can be on btrfs.  That is almost certainly
the case.

> Ok, so I guess we can basically rule out GPT for the default label even
> on POWER systems. I would therefore then vote for using MS-DOS partition
> tables on POWER systems, i.e. what is already used now.

For powerpc/ppc64 I would agree.  For ppc64el GPT should be fine, and
I believe someone said that is in fact what they have done since it is
power8+ only.

> So, MS-DOS partition tables will not work at all on a Mac, correct?

Not as far as I know.  And given the apple partition table is better
anyhow, why would you want to?

-- 
Len Sorensen

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

[Mathieu Malaterre]

Hi Adrian,

On Thu, Sep 21, 2017 at 2:21 PM, John Paul Adrian Glaubitz
<glaubitz@physik.fu-berlin.de> wrote:
> Hi!
>
> I would help with this transition to use GRUB on powerpc as well
> as on ppc64 which we are now providing unofficial installation
> for in Debian Ports [1].

Missing link '1'.

> I do have commit access to debian-installer and its components
> as well as access to an IBM POWER7 instance which can be used
> to test both powerpc as well as ppc64 installation images.
>
> I would like to get rid of yaboot because it is no longer maintained
> upstream and switching to GRUB also helps reduce the maintenance
> burden in debian-installer.
>
> What we need are people who are willing to extensively test d-i
> images with GRUB on powerpc and ppc64 and report back. Also, I'm
> not yet sure whether I have understood how exactly GRUB is properly
> configured and used on powerpc and ppc64.

Sure ! I still have a PowerMac G4 & Mac Mini to test. Both work
booting d-i from a USB key.

Thanks for your work
-M

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

[John Paul Adrian Glaubitz]

On 09/21/2017 11:14 PM, Lennart Sorensen wrote:
> Well as long as grub can read that, then no problem.  So as long as
> grub-install is including btrfs support in the grub image placed in the
> prep boot partition, then /boot can be on btrfs.  That is almost certainly
> the case.

Yeah, I guess that's the big advantage of GRUB. That it can handle all these
new and fancy filesystems :).

>> Ok, so I guess we can basically rule out GPT for the default label even
>> on POWER systems. I would therefore then vote for using MS-DOS partition
>> tables on POWER systems, i.e. what is already used now.
> 
> For powerpc/ppc64 I would agree.  For ppc64el GPT should be fine, and
> I believe someone said that is in fact what they have done since it is
> power8+ only.

Touching ppc64el was never up for discussion. I was just mentioning it.

>> So, MS-DOS partition tables will not work at all on a Mac, correct?
> 
> Not as far as I know.  And given the apple partition table is better
> anyhow, why would you want to?

I was just wondering whether it makes sense for GRUB to use MS-DOS partition
on a Mac, thinking it may be better than Mac partition tables, I was
basically just thinking aloud. If it's not necessary for GRUB to work
properly, then we can stick with the current partition scheme, of course.

FWIW, I made this change [1] to partman-partitioning now which will result
to debian-installer using the same disk labels on ppc64 for the various
sub-architectures as on powerpc. There are, of course, no 64-Bit OldWorld
Macs, Cell CPUs and so on, but I guess my change is more elegant than duplicating
the case statement for ppc64 and removing all the unsupported subarchitectures.

Adrian

> [1] https://anonscm.debian.org/cgit/d-i/partman-partitioning.git/commit/?id=6bb0eaf810bced7f8f637a14df82d3122b56ecaa

-- 
  .''`.  John Paul Adrian Glaubitz
: :' :  Debian Developer - glaubitz@debian.org
`. `'   Freie Universitaet Berlin - glaubitz@physik.fu-berlin.de
   `-    GPG: 62FF 8A75 84E0 2956 9546  0006 7426 3B37 F5B5 F913

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

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Fri, Sep 22, 2017 at 11:49:38AM +0200, John Paul Adrian Glaubitz wrote:
> I was just wondering whether it makes sense for GRUB to use MS-DOS partition
> on a Mac, thinking it may be better than Mac partition tables, I was
> basically just thinking aloud. If it's not necessary for GRUB to work
> properly, then we can stick with the current partition scheme, of course.

Well it doesn't sound better, and would certainly be unfriendly do dual
booting with MacOS.

> FWIW, I made this change [1] to partman-partitioning now which will result
> to debian-installer using the same disk labels on ppc64 for the various
> sub-architectures as on powerpc. There are, of course, no 64-Bit OldWorld
> Macs, Cell CPUs and so on, but I guess my change is more elegant than duplicating
> the case statement for ppc64 and removing all the unsupported subarchitectures.

I would have thought the firmware on the mac would insist on an apple
partition table to boot.

-- 
Len Sorensen

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

[John Paul Adrian Glaubitz]

On 09/22/2017 08:41 PM, Lennart Sorensen wrote:
> On Fri, Sep 22, 2017 at 11:49:38AM +0200, John Paul Adrian Glaubitz wrote:
>> I was just wondering whether it makes sense for GRUB to use MS-DOS partition
>> on a Mac, thinking it may be better than Mac partition tables, I was
>> basically just thinking aloud. If it's not necessary for GRUB to work
>> properly, then we can stick with the current partition scheme, of course.
> 
> Well it doesn't sound better, and would certainly be unfriendly do dual
> booting with MacOS.

As I said, I was thinking aloud, that's all.

>> FWIW, I made this change [1] to partman-partitioning now which will result
>> to debian-installer using the same disk labels on ppc64 for the various
>> sub-architectures as on powerpc. There are, of course, no 64-Bit OldWorld
>> Macs, Cell CPUs and so on, but I guess my change is more elegant than duplicating
>> the case statement for ppc64 and removing all the unsupported subarchitectures.
> 
> I would have thought the firmware on the mac would insist on an apple
> partition table to boot.

And I already made the change above to use Mac partitions on Apple hardware.

Adrian

-- 
 .''`.  John Paul Adrian Glaubitz
: :' :  Debian Developer - glaubitz@debian.org
`. `'   Freie Universitaet Berlin - glaubitz@physik.fu-berlin.de
  `-    GPG: 62FF 8A75 84E0 2956 9546  0006 7426 3B37 F5B5 F913

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

[Gabriel Paubert]

On Thu, Sep 21, 2017 at 12:10:17PM -0400, Daniel Kahn Gillmor wrote:
> On Thu 2017-09-21 10:26:08 -0400, Daniel Kahn Gillmor wrote:
> > I like this idea but i don't have a lot of spare machines handy to try
> > d-i on these days.  I can try to dig up a power supply for an idle older
> > ppc laptop i've got floating around, but i don't know whether i'll be
> > able to find it.
> 
> I should mention: i currently run (and have run in the past) many
> powerpc systems (old Mac hardware, mainly, running an OpenFirmware forth
> shell from the mainboard), all of which i either directly installed with
> grub (via debootstrap from debirf) or converted from yaboot to grub.
> I've yet to find one (even a really old blue clamshell iBook with 64MiB
> of RAM) that grub didn't work for me on in the end.  So for the machines
> i've dealt with, the question is more about d-i integration than about
> whether grub will work or not.
> 
> I do note that there have been some interesting endianness issues
> (e.g. channel-swap, or palette inversion) with the colorspace when
> trying to use grub's graphical mode (but i've seen similar issues with
> non-grub stuff as well).  I don't know how much we care in this
> discussion about grub's graphical capabilities, as compared to its
> booting capabilities.

Well, I have grub on my PowerStation (~quad G5), although I'm still 
using 32 bit userspace (from Debian Sid). I did not try to switch to
64 bit while it still had the original 2GB of RAM and even light use
caused significant swapping (and associated slowdowns); now that it 
has 32GB, I think it can be switched to 64 bit and I plan to do it soon
(November or so, I'm moving in between).

But I digress, coming back to grub: not only are the colors off during 
boot, but also the boot menu text entries are not displayed correctly 
(they only appear briefly just before the wait for keyboard input times
out). 

Also the first text lines (from grub?) are displayed won't make your
eyes bleed but will be difficult to decrypt in case of problems: they
are displyed in black on a black background. 

	Gabriel
> 
> yaboot had no graphical capabilities at all, iirc.
> 
>           --dkg

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

[Frank Scheiner]

On 09/21/2017 10:37 PM, John Paul Adrian Glaubitz wrote:
> [...]
> I have one POWER7 machine that has been provided to me by IBM for testing
> purposes and to host one of our buildds. I have performed a test installation
> of openSUSE Tumbleweed on it.
> 
> Here's the partitioning scheme that is being used:
> 
> (parted) p
> Model: Virtio Block Device (virtblk)
> Disk /dev/vda: 42.9GB
> Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B
> Partition Table: msdos
> Disk Flags:
> 
> Number  Start   End     Size    Type     File system     Flags
>   1      1049kB  2097kB  1049kB  primary                  boot, prep, type=41
>   2      2097kB  2163MB  2161MB  primary  linux-swap(v1)  type=82
>   3      2163MB  18.9GB  16.7GB  primary  btrfs           type=83
>   4      18.9GB  42.9GB  24.0GB  primary  xfs             type=83
> 
> (parted)
> 
> Interestingly, /boot is part of the btrfs filesystem:
> 
> linux-mfl2:~ # mount | grep boot
> /dev/vda3 on /boot/grub2/powerpc-ieee1275 type btrfs (rw,relatime,space_cache,subvolid=261,subvol=/@/boot/grub2/powerpc-ieee1275)
> linux-mfl2:~ #

Do we have information about how it looks (e.g. is it Grub by default 
and then, where is it installed?) for a POWER8 machine with Debian 
Stretch (ppc64le) installed from an installer image?

If also working for ppc64 and powerpc architecture machines that way it 
could be straight-forward to use the same method (with respective 
partitioning schemes for Apple and IBM machines) there, too.

****

I'm currently updating my Xserve G4 from Wheezy over Jessie to Sid. From 
where I will install Grub. I thought it would be useful to first check 
if what I described in [1] for ppc64 will also work for powerpc with the 
"latest" Grub.

[1]: https://lists.debian.org/debian-powerpc/2017/09/msg00034.html

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

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Sat, Sep 23, 2017 at 02:25:32PM +0200, Frank Scheiner wrote:
> Do we have information about how it looks (e.g. is it Grub by default and
> then, where is it installed?) for a POWER8 machine with Debian Stretch
> (ppc64le) installed from an installer image?
> 
> If also working for ppc64 and powerpc architecture machines that way it
> could be straight-forward to use the same method (with respective
> partitioning schemes for Apple and IBM machines) there, too.

Well I think at this point it seems the only option is:

powerpc/ppc64:
On IBM use DOS partition table with a prep boot partition for grub.
On Apple use Apple partition table (I don't know where grub is installed
on those).

ppc64el:
On IBM use GPT and install grub there as is already the case.

There does not appear to be any way to merge what Apple and IBM
machines do.  They are just not compatible that way.

-- 
Len Sorensen

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

[John Paul Adrian Glaubitz]

On 09/25/2017 04:48 PM, Lennart Sorensen wrote:
> Well I think at this point it seems the only option is:
> 
> powerpc/ppc64:
> On IBM use DOS partition table with a prep boot partition for grub.
> On Apple use Apple partition table (I don't know where grub is installed
> on those).

I thought we already agreed on this?

> ppc64el:
> On IBM use GPT and install grub there as is already the case.

I don't know why you keep mentioning ppc64el. ppc64el is completely
out of the question for any efforts made within Debian Ports.

Adrian

-- 
  .''`.  John Paul Adrian Glaubitz
: :' :  Debian Developer - glaubitz@debian.org
`. `'   Freie Universitaet Berlin - glaubitz@physik.fu-berlin.de
   `-    GPG: 62FF 8A75 84E0 2956 9546  0006 7426 3B37 F5B5 F913

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

[Frank Scheiner]

On 09/25/2017 04:50 PM, John Paul Adrian Glaubitz wrote:
> On 09/25/2017 04:48 PM, Lennart Sorensen wrote:
>> Well I think at this point it seems the only option is:
>>
>> powerpc/ppc64:
>> On IBM use DOS partition table with a prep boot partition for grub.
>> On Apple use Apple partition table (I don't know where grub is installed
>> on those).
> 
> I thought we already agreed on this?

Me too. I'd say what partiton tables are needed for IBM or Apple 
machines is agreed already.

But I thought about where Grub (modules) is/are installed (i.e. own 
partition, `/boot/grub[...]/`, etc.) on ppc64el. And what is used as 
boot loader, a Grub image with all needed modules included, or a small 
Grub image that loads its modules from somewhere else. And e.g. two Grub 
config files, an embedded one for the Grub image and an additional one 
in `/boot/[...]` or something different.

I assume it would be beneficial to use the same scheme that Debian uses 
for Grub on ppc64el (apart from the partition tables of course). That's 
why I asked for information about POWER8 and ppc64el.

Or was this planned anyhow and I just overlooked or misunderstood things?

> 
>> ppc64el:
>> On IBM use GPT and install grub there as is already the case.
> 
> I don't know why you keep mentioning ppc64el. ppc64el is completely
> out of the question for any efforts made within Debian Ports.

Not totally, because it could be used as example, as mentioned above.

Cheers,
Frank

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

[John Paul Adrian Glaubitz]

On 09/25/2017 05:05 PM, Frank Scheiner wrote:
> But I thought about where Grub (modules) is/are installed (i.e. own partition,
> `/boot/grub[...]/`, etc.) on ppc64el. And what is used as boot loader, a Grub
> image with all needed modules included, or a small Grub image that loads its
> modules from somewhere else. And e.g. two Grub config files, an embedded one
> for the Grub image and an additional one in `/boot/[...]` or something different.
> 
> I assume it would be beneficial to use the same scheme that Debian uses for Grub
> on ppc64el (apart from the partition tables of course). That's why I asked for
> information about POWER8 and ppc64el.

It probably makes more sense to look at how GRUB is configured in openSUSE
on ppc64. Because that's actually exactly our setup, namely GRUB in ppc64
on POWER with an MS-DOS partition table.

>>> ppc64el:
>>> On IBM use GPT and install grub there as is already the case.
>>
>> I don't know why you keep mentioning ppc64el. ppc64el is completely
>> out of the question for any efforts made within Debian Ports.
> 
> Not totally, because it could be used as example, as mentioned above.
Lennart said it in a way as if we were to make any changes to ppc64el,
we aren't and we cannot.

Adrian

-- 
  .''`.  John Paul Adrian Glaubitz
: :' :  Debian Developer - glaubitz@debian.org
`. `'   Freie Universitaet Berlin - glaubitz@physik.fu-berlin.de
   `-    GPG: 62FF 8A75 84E0 2956 9546  0006 7426 3B37 F5B5 F913

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

[luigi burdo]

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I had in past issue with grub on opensuse, i have a G5 970MP.

Adrian make a great present to us, making us have again debian working on BE .

please do not made again it not usable on our hardware choosing grub.


Luigi


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

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Mon, Sep 25, 2017 at 03:15:15PM +0000, luigi burdo wrote:
> I had in past issue with grub on opensuse, i have a G5 970MP.
> 
> Adrian make a great present to us, making us have again debian working on BE .
> 
> please do not made again it not usable on our hardware choosing grub.

I have had issues with grub on opensuse running x86, so that doesn't
really mean much.

yaboot isn't being maintained, is a pain to build because it only
works with an obsolete version of the ext fs library, which makes it
incompatible with new ext* features.

Much better to spend effort getting any bugs in grub fixed.  A lot were
fixed some 5 or 6 years ago when I wanted grub on an IBM p520 and worked
with upstream to debug a lot of issues there over a few months.

-- 
Len Sorensen