State of GRUB on PowerPC

[Jordi Mallach]

Hello list,

Many months after my last try, I've given GRUB2 a go on my G4-based Apple
laptop.

For this, I used Debian's 1st of December snapshot packaged to experimental.

Thanks to daChaac, the IRC hero once again ;) the executive summary changed
from "frustrating failure" to "works with quite a few quirks".

 - grub-install generated an incorrect device.map. I've discussed this here
   before: my OpenFirmware calls my hard disk "hd", not "hd0", but
   grub-mkdevicemap will insist in adding the number. I corrected that
   manually.
 - GRUB2 will load correctly and will display a menu, but will fail to load
   Linux, giving a fun error "initrd: command not found". Some modules
   needed by my grub.cfg are missing: _linux, linux, elf and search.

Loading linux.mod was challenging. `insmod linux` would result in a "file
not found" error. I have two partitions that matter when booting:
hd,2 is the Apple_bootstrap hfs partition, and holds all my grub stuff.
hd,3 is my Debian partition, and holds /usr/lib/grub.

daChaac helped me finding the deps for linux.mod, and loading them
sequentially made the module load:

grub> insmod elf
grub> insmod (hd,3)/usr/lib/grub/powerpc-ieee1275/_linux.mod
grub> insmod (hd,3)/usr/lib/grub/powerpc-ieee1275/linux.mod

This gets linux loaded, and things start to be smoother.

However, going back to the menu and trying to boot fails with "you need
to load your kernel first". Damn.

Right, my menu entry includes a search command, which isn't loaded

grub> insmod search

But this still fails miseraby.

On the command-line, I copied the "search --fs-uuid --set" line from my
grub.cfg, and
1) it printed "no such device" and errored out ($?=12,
GRUB_ERR_UNKNOWN_DEVICE)
2) set my root variable to (second-boot).

Our guess is that this second-boot device has the same uuid as hd or hd,3
and that makes search fail or whatever.

if I do "ls", I get hd + its partitions, ide0, ide1, first-boot and
second-boot. `ls (first-boot)` gives:
Device first-boot: partition table
and `ls (first-boot)/` gives the "unknown filesystem" error.

Finally, if I get rid of the search command and change my root device to simply
/dev/hda3, linux is able to boot and I remain happy.

So, in short, a few problems:

- grub-mkdevicemap insists on calling my drive by another name (hd0 vs hd)
- what's going on with linux.mod loading? I won't rule out a hfs fs bug,
  and I'll format to find out, but it could be a hfs.mod bug too. Some
  modules load, some others don't.
- why wasn't search.mod loaded?
- what to do about second-boot confusing search?

Ah, also, my menu appears as white on red colours, but this is so minor at
this point I was not even going to mention it. :)

Hopefully some OF expert can have a look at some of this.

Thanks,
Jordi
-- 
Jordi Mallach Pérez  --  Debian developer     http://www.debian.org/
address@hidden     address@hidden     http://www.sindominio.net/
GnuPG public key information available at http://oskuro.net/

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