Debian PowerPc installer initramfs-tools generates malformed yaboot.conf created when alternate partitions use UUID= in fstab

[Rogério Brito]

Keeping the CC'ies, to not leave anybody out of the discussion.

On Jun 28 2010, Benjamin Cama wrote:
> - maintenance of yaboot has always been "flacky" in the sense that
> maintainers seem to get hopeless on the lack of interest/motivation
> from powerpc devs/users

That's one of the problems of using a less popular platform. :-(

> - there are currently no DD that care about powerpc problems (or we
> could rather say that no people who care about PPC are DDs)

We don't exactly need to have DD's to take care of the PPC problems.
While that would make things easier, it is not a strict requirement, as
long as one has a powerpc machine.

That being said, I don't know if it would be worth investing some time
more in the migration from yaboot to grub2, since the latter is supposed
to have many features that the former doesn't.

My iBook G3 is currently having some weird issues (shutting itself down
or freezing hard), and I suspect that it is due to heat.  I intend to
get grub2 to work, once I get it to boot, though.

The short story is to make sure that:

* the initial grub binary is in the initial HFS filesystem;
* open firmware looks for that binary;
* the grub binary loads the kernel

The longer story:

* http://grub.enbug.org/TestingOnPowerPC
* http://oskuro.net/blog/freesoftware/time-for-grub2-2008-02-09-17-53
* http://lists.debian.org/debian-powerpc/2009/06/msg00064.html

> I wanted to help for a problem with the buildd but Frans Pop told us
> that it needed a DD to be solved, and I also have a patch for
> util-linux specific to PPC that is waiting for monthes. But there are
> only users and simple developers left on the debian-powerpc ML, so
> we're a bit alone and hopeless ...

Which patch do you have? Did you push it to the maintainers of the
util-linux package? Or to upstream? Just curious.

Does yaboot FTBFS, apart from a powerpc 64 issue? That patch could be
integrated, though, but I don't have any ppc64 machine to see if it
makes sense.

A build spin of yaboot would be nice, regardless, even if it is just to
make some janitorial changes to the debian packaging. I can prepare some
of those, if Aurélien doesn't mind.


Regards,

-- 
Rogério Brito : rbrito@{ime.usp.br,gmail.com} : GPG key 1024D/7C2CAEB8
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