Re: PPC64

[Pavel Roskin <proski@gnu.org>]

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Hello!

I just want to post some PowerPC related information in this thread
without delving deep into this discussion.

GRUB_MOD_GAP is needed to work around a bug on PowerMac G3 (Blue&White).
Without the gap, images created by grub-mkimage would not load.
OpenFirmware would report: "CLAIM failed".

I believe grub-mkimage doesn't generate valid ELF files, but they are
"good enough" for OpenFirmware.  But only with the gap.

I have never tried compiling GRUB on 64-bit PowerPC.  However, I tried
cross-compiling it on x86_64 for PowerPC and found a bug in
grub-mkimage, which I fixed.  Look for GRUB_TARGET_SIZEOF_LONG in
ChangeLog.

Once this bug is fixed, it should be safe to remove all references
host_m32 from configure.ac.  However, I left it in place because I
didn't have a 64-bit PowerPC to test.

util/ieee1275/grub-install.in is not suitable for PowerPC.  It assumes
that /boot is on the HFS boot partition.  It's not the case for Fedora
and perhaps any distro.  The HFS boot partition is not mounted and
should be accessed by hfstools.  The modules should be installed
under /boot/grub.  The path to /boot/grub should be embedded into the
core image.  We have support for embedding the default module path now.
We need a better script that would not put all modules on the short HFS
boot partition.  Considering that the SPARC port is defunct, I would
just rewrite util/ieee1275/grub-install.in.

I'm attaching two scripts I'm using to test PowerPC grub on x86_64.  One
is building the tools for the host architecture, the other builds them
for PowerPC and uses qemu to run them.  The paths should be adjusted,
obviously.

-- 
Regards,
Pavel Roskin

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