grub-install on powermac newworld

[Mike Small <smallm@panix.com>]

I'd meant to try the grub-install script for powerpc a long time ago,
when Hollis sent out the patch in October, but got distracted.  Now
that I have tried it, a couple of comments:

1. The path to ofpathname is hard-coded in the script as /usr/sbin.
For me running on debian that doesn't seem right.  Since it's not
currently part of a package, I'd probably end up putting it in
/usr/local/sbin instead.  Maybe its presence and location should be
detected by configure?  Also, there's a script named ofpath that comes
with yaboot that would be present in most distributions which I
suspect could be detected and used for the same purpose if ofpathname
weren't present, if that's something you'd want to do.

2. The script seems to assume that /boot/grub/ will be where my boot
partition is mounted.  This was mentioned in the original mail, and I
could set things up this way, but in my opinion it would be more
natural to be able to specify the install directory exactly without
mandating any particular directory structure.  eg if I enter
  $ grub-install --root-directory=/mnt 
...(which is how I ran it, forgetting that part of the email) then
grub and its modules would go directly into /mnt and not into a
/mnt/boot/grub.

I didn't really exercise the nvsetenv part of the script since I've
had problems setting the boot device on this machine before (466
Powermac G4 - it seems to want to add ,\\:tbxi to whatever
boot-device string I set) and, since I didn't follow the directory
structure the script was expecting, it stopped before trying to set the
env variables ("/mnt/boot/grub is not a mount point!").  Let me know
if it would be helpful to test out that part and I'll give it a try
with my boot partion mounted at /boot/grub.

After I moved the files from /mnt/boot/grub to the root of my boot
partition (which is hfs) and rebooted, grub seemed to work okay (more
than okay really, I love that you can cat files from the bootloader -
neat stuff) until I typed in an initrd command.  Then I got the error
message: "Can not claim memory."  This was with a backported 2.6.12
kernel from a debian developer's site (Sven Luther) but the same thing
happened with the standard Sarge 2.6.8 kernel.  The kernel was 4641711
bytes and the initrd image was 4820992 bytes.

Is grub/ppc at the point where it makes sense to be testing initrd
yet?  I was about to reboot with an extra debugging message to try to
get more information, thinking this might have something to do with
the values of these variables in grub_rescue_cmd_initrd...

  addr = linux_addr + linux_size;
  size = grub_file_size (file);

... but I don't really know how grub_claimmap is supposed to work here
or what exactly to look for or report.

-- 
Mike Small
smallm@panix.com