Re: Maturity of GRUB on powerpc/ppc64?

[John Paul Adrian Glaubitz]

Hi Frank!

On 09/26/2017 08:57 PM, Frank Scheiner wrote:
> Sorry, I'm a little occupied recently, but I was successful in installing and
> using Grub to boot my Xserve G4 on Debian Sid this weekend. Haven't tried on 
> other
> G3 or G4 Power Macs yet, though.

Please try to perform some more testing. I'm especially interested in tests
on 32-bit hardware to make sure we don't break anything there.

> I'll describe details maybe later this week. In short, it works similar in 
> general
> to what I described for the Power Mac G5 (11,2). On the Xserve G4 I used it
> without separate partition for `/boot` without an issue (the partition for
> `/` was formatted with EXT4 during the original Wheezy installation on this 
> machine).

Ok. This basically needs to be performed by the grub-installer package in 
debian-installer.

> It cost me some time to find out what was the correct setting to activate the 
> serial
> console. By default Grub uses a glass console, even if there is no graphics
> card installed. But this is usually not an issue for the workstations.

We had a similar discussion regarding this on SPARC as most SPARC machines
these days are pure servers without a video display. So, they have to be
configured to use a GRUB serial console. But it's not that difficult and
something we could add to the default configuration when installing on
these targets, possibly controlled by a command line option to debian-installer.

Adrian

-- 
 .''`.  John Paul Adrian Glaubitz
: :' :  Debian Developer - address@hidden
`. `'   Freie Universitaet Berlin - address@hidden
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