Re: Re: Booting openSUSE-NET-ppc-Build0003-Media.iso

On 24.02.2012, at 11:59, Dinar Valeev <[email protected]> wrote:

> On Fri, Feb 24, 2012 at 10:11 AM, Andreas Färber <[email protected]> wrote:
>> Am 24.02.2012 03:42, schrieb Larry Stotler:
>>> On Thu, Feb 23, 2012 at 5:18 PM, Andreas Färber <[email protected]> wrote:
>>>> After lots of Alt-E (don't show again), Alt-J (use this file) and Alt-N
>>>> (don't use this file) I finally got the installation running through
>>>> until it wants to reboot. After reboot the system is not bootable and
>>>> drops back to System Management menu and the boot options there too do
>>>> not recognize any bootable devices apart from CD-ROM and NICs.
>>>> Previously there was AIX5 on the disk and it seemed it was completely
>>>> repartitioned by the installer.
>>> 
>>> On your system, YaST probably just used the whole disk.  I've never
>>> used any of the POWER systems so I can't really help.
>>> 
>>> SLED 11(SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop) would likely have better
>>> support for your hardware. [...]
>> 
>> Our quest here is testing and fixing Factory, not running some
>> old-but-working version. :) Kudos to Dinar for getting it this far already!
>> 
>> So I am mainly in need of pointers how to get some of these fixed.
>> 
>> I verified that using ext4 and always choosing Alt+J for the checksums
>> did not help.
>> 
>> I notice that the CD that boots fine uses \suse\yaboot.ibm, whereas the
>> FAT16 boot partition uses just a yaboot file. Are there differences
>> between yaboot and yaboot.ibm maybe? I tried appending all kinds of
>> things in OF such as :1,yaboot without success, and the SMS menu is able
>> to boot fine from CD but not from disk.
> If SMS doesn't sees a disk to boot from, then you don't have
> bootloader installed to the disk.
> 
> The right debug would be after isntallation run lilo in verbose mode.
> So we can see if yaboot wrapped correctly.
> 
> I finally have G5 on my desk (ppc970 based). So soon I'll start to do
> tests on G5 as well besides pSeries tests.
> 
> And yes. Back to december I remember that bootloader installation was
> failed even on pSeries. So something is wrong with lilo or
> perl-Bootloader.

At least the Apple OF has support for ELF straight in the firmware, so one thing to try would be to completely circumvent yaboot and boot the kernel straight from there. I don't think you can use an initrd with this though, so you might want to compile your own kernel with everything set to =y that you need to boot.

It's just an alternative to get the system booting at all and debug yaboot from there.

You can also try to run it in qemu-system-ppc64 with -M pseries, which should behave very similar to the pseries OF. Just that you can there modify the image from the outside to debug.


Alex

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