Re: G4 yaboot questions


Subject: Re: G4 yaboot questions
From: Hollis R Blanchard (hollis+@andrew.cmu.edu)
Date: Tue Nov 07 2000 - 13:13:48 MST


On Mon, 6 Nov 2000, Stefan Jeglinski wrote:
>
> 1. YDL updates says mistakes were made, there should be 4 slashes in
> front of vmlinux, not two, in yaboot.conf. Does this 4-slash rule
> also apply to the procedure to set OF to select either yaboot or
> bootscript (setenv blah blah blah)? And does it also apply to the
> bootscript text?

No. The yaboot.conf changes are just that -- yaboot.conf changes.
"\\\\" is necessary to get yaboot to use "\\".

Open Firmware (and the yaboot command line) uses "\\". The bootscript,
which is an Open Firmware script, is of course the same.

Finally, if there were problems in OF or the bootscript I think we
probably would have mentioned that along with the yaboot.conf fix.

> 2. All references to the hard drive in the dox I can find use the
> terminology "hd". But there have been lots of references in archives
> to "ultra0" and even "ultra1". Can I get a definitive statement of
> which to use and when and why?

This has been answered, but to put all the answers in one email:
"hd" and "ultra0" are equivalent and mean the master IDE drive.
"ultra1" means the slave IDE drive.

> 3. In yaboot.conf, "hd:," (that's hd colon comma, no space)
> supposedly refers to "the first HFS partition of the first IDE hard
> drive."

More accurately it refers to the first non-driver partition on your
master IDE drive, but that's almost always of type "Apple_HFS".

> Apparently if I'm not on the first partition, I should be
> putting the partition number in thusly: "hd:N," (that's hd colon
> partition# comma, no space). True?

Yes. However the partition on which the Mac OS is installed is almost
always the first non-driver partition. So if you have your yaboot binary
etc on that partition, you do not need to use "N".

> 4. w.r.t. question 3, both vmlinux and yaboot are on the Mac boot
> partition (in the System Folder), so N should always refer to that
> Mac boot partition alone, no?

That's fine... but as I mentioned you generally don't need to supply a
value for "N" at all in this case.

> 5. w.r.t. question 4, where does the partition for the root device
> (/dev/hdXX) come in? Surely it must appear somewhere.

Nope. The kernel is able to detect your root partition automatically if
you do not specify one. It only considers partitions of type
"Apple_UNIX_SVR2" when doing this check.

You can of course specify one if you have multiple Linux installations
(otherwise the kernel would automatically detect and boot the first one
only).

> 6. In the bootscript, consider the line:
>
> " Booting Yaboot ..." cr " boot hd:,\\yaboot.tbxi" eval
>
> Pending other answers, this line implies that the yaboot binary
> must be named exactly yaboot.tbxi, no?

Correct. However, those directions are old. In particular, the yaboot
distributed on the CD as "yaboot.tbxi" is yaboot 0.5. You probably should
upgrade (and so take out the ".tbxi" part).

> That is, does the tbxi refer
> only to the file type or does it reflect the exact name of the file?
> If the former, I guess I need to make sure the file type is tbxi,
> using FileBuddy for example? See also question 7.

You do not need to do this; you have specified the file name, which is
completely independent of the file type.

> 7. In the bootscript, consider the line:
>
> " Booting Mac OS ..." cr " boot hd:,\\:tbxi" eval
>
> Here, the tbxi refers strictly to file type, no? The real target
> is the ROM, no? ("Mac OS ROM" has type tbxi, but tbxi does not appear
> in the name of the ROM file).

Yes and yes.

> And since there have been lots of
> scattered OFFICIAL blunders (2 slashes instead of 4, or the infamous
> "txbi" instead of "tbxi"), is it true that there is -no- colon before
> yaboot.tbxi (booting to Linux), but there -is- a colon before tbxi
> (booting to MacOS)?

The colon indicates file type. I think you already figured that part out
though. How else would Open Firmware know not to boot a file called "tbxi"?

-Hollis



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