Re: Xserve G5 OpenFirmware 'CLAIM failed' after dist-upgrade

Hi Stuar


On Fri, 2025-04-11 at 15:16 +1200, Stuart MacIntosh wrote:
> I run a couple of old Xserve G5s (RackMac3,1) and they have all failed 
> to reboot following an "apt-get dist-upgrade", which I normally do every 
> month. Installing grub-ieee1275 (2.12-7) seems to have been what did it, 
> or maybe it was the kernel, I don't know. The machines drop to the OFW 
> console with an "invalid memory access error" instead of booting.

Sounds like an incompatibility with the current grub-ieee1275 on Apple PowerMac.

> Manually booting such as with "boot hd:,\\grub" returns a "CLAIM failed" 
> error. I'd be grateful for any troubleshooting tips.
> 
> Has anyone else run into this issue? Should I try rebuilding grub and/or 
> the kernel myself?

Not yet, but I haven't performed a dist-upgrade on my PowerBook G4 yet which
I am using for these tests. I will try to do that over the next days and
see if I can reproduce this.

> An excerpt from the OFW console is attached. I even checked the space 
> weather because for 3 machines to fail at once like this, it's either 
> software or a solar flare :-)

I think it would be wise to report this to the grub-devel upstream mailing
list [1] and see if you can get any feedback. The background is that Debian
backports upstream changes from time to time and I could imagine that some
of the recent PowerPC-related changes may have broken your machine.

Do you happen to know what the last working grub-ieee1275 version was?

Adrian

> [1] https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/grub-devel/

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