Re: oldworld powermac boot loader?

[Hollis Blanchard]

On Fri, 10 Feb 2006 17:18:56 +1100 (EST), "Finn Thain"
<address@hidden> said:
> 
> I just Googled up some of your work on grub 2, and wanted to ask a couple 
> of questions. You see, I ran into that bug in the biege g3 firmware that 
> prevents booting an OS not installed in the first 8 GB. So my question
> is, 
> does grub 2 work on oldworld machines? If so, can it boot OS 9, OS X and 
> Linux? Should I create a partition for a future grub 2 stage?

Hi Finn, I hope you don't mind if I CC the grub-devel mailing list (and
sorry for the mail resend issues).

GRUB2 does not currently work on Old World PowerMacs. It will require
some effort to change that; in particular we will need to write a stage1
loader of our own, similar to quik's stage1. That code needs to fit in
512 bytes, so will have to be done in assembly.

Actually, I started Old World support by just using quik's stage1.
Unfortunately that is limited to loading only 64KB of stage2, and grub2
is over 200KB the last time I looked.

This on my TODO list, but pretty low on my list. I would be more than
happy to help anybody interested in the problem.

-Hollis