Re: [PATCH] Remove HFS support

[John Paul Adrian Glaubitz]

On 8/20/22 15:53, Daniel Axtens wrote:
> Really, plain HFS, not HFS+? Wowsers!

Yes, we're currently using HFS.

> Just to be clear, by PowerMacs you mean Macs with PowerPC chips, so
> machines last produced around 2006?

Yes.

> Have you checked that you can't boot them with HFS+? Because HFS+
> came in 1998, which was (AFAICT) pretty early on in the G3 lifecycle. So
> I'd be really surprised if the firmware didn't support booting from
> HFS+. I'd be very keen to hear.

I have not tested that due to lack of time. The problem is that some early
firmware versions might have issues with HFS+ that we haven't verified
yet.

> Anyway, if I've understood correctly, the _most recent_ PowerMacs date
> from around 16 years ago, and potentially the machines broken by this
> would be even older. I still think that's in the domain of
> retrocomputing and I don't understand the use case for running modern
> software on something where the performance per watt is worse than a
> recent raspberry pi.

What's wrong with retrocomputing? Debian's popcon currently reports more
machines running the 32-bit big-endian Debian port than the 64-bit little
endian port, see [1].

I understand the need to sometimes get rid of old code, but since the HFS
module can be blacklisted as Vladimir explains, I don't really understand
the reasoning in this particular case.

FWIW, Gentoo also still uses HFS for booting PowerMacs [2].

Adrian

> [1] https://popcon.debian.org/
> [2] https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/GRUB_on_Open_Firmware_(PowerPC)

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