Re: Why it's so difficult to fix PowerMac booting for good
On 05/27 2023 20:05 Stan Johnson wrote:
On 5/27/23 10:34 AM, Linux User #330250 wrote:
Any thoughts?
...
It's not safe for a Linux distribution to mount the Apple_Bootstrap
partition except when it actually needs to write to it. Keeping it
mounted as /boot, or /boot/grub, leaves it vulnerable to corruption if
the system crashes (just like 64-bit Intel systems are vulnerable by
keeping the EFI partition mounted).
I'm not planning to use GRUB as long as I can't use it to pick Mac OS X
and Mac OS 9 volumes from the menu like I can with yaboot.
The NewWorld Bootblock would not ever be mounted on Linux. It wouldn't
contain anything useful for Linux anyway, as the sole purpose of it
would be to load the configfile from the real /boot partition, which
would be ext2/3/4 or anything else usable by Linux, containing not only
grub.cfg, but also the Linux kernels (the usual /boot).
In that accessible grub.cfg one would be able to include Mac OS X...
Perhaps GRUB could use whatever yaboot uses to create the
Apple_Bootstrap partition and bless it with ybin, or was yaboot
violating Debian license rules with its ybin and use of HFS? Similarly,
perhaps GRUB could be enabled to boot Mac OS X or Mac OS 9 volumes in
the same way that yaboot already does.
As I understood it, the problem is that the parts required to do that
are non-free...
Either way (GRUB or yaboot), I will continue to have only a very basic
configuration, with one entry per partition, with the kernel always
vmlinux (or vmlinuz) and the initrd always initrd.img, with symbolic
links in /boot on the relevant partitions pointing to the real kernel
and initrd.img that I want to use. I don't need GRUB to maintain a list
of all the kernels that I keep in /boot, and this way I have a
consistent way to use GRUB (and make it work like yaboot) on all
architectures that support GRUB.
GRUB has a lot of advantages over yaboot. Not only does it allow many
more boot options, it also allows to edit the kernel commandline, which
is great to test various options without making them permanent in the
boot configuration files.
Linux User #330250
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