[Debootloaders-yaboot] Bug#589701: ofpath is not compatible with non-builtin disk controllers
Rick Thomas
rbthomas at pobox.com
Wed Sep 29 04:44:26 UTC 2010
On Sep 29, 2010, at 12:12 AM, Milan Kupcevic wrote:
> On 09/28/2010 07:26 PM, Benjamin Cama wrote:
>> Well, even if you didn't mention it explicitly, it was listed in the
>> lspci dump since the beginning and nobody saw it until now. And one
>> may
>> also find it disturbing that a piece of software doesn't work with an
>> addon card on a machine that has free slots to add such cards ! But
>> bootstrapping an OS on non-original hardware modification is always a
>> bit hard.
>
> Promise add-on sata controllers do not have proper OpenFirmware
> support.
> Therefore, they will never be able to boot an OpenFirmware machine.
> There are very few add-on SATA controllers with proper OpenFirmware
> support. Here are four I personally tried out:
>
> Sonnet Tempo SATA PCI [1]
> SeriTek/1V4 [2]
> SeriTek/1eVE2+2 [3]
> SeriTek/1S2 [4]
>
> Other SeriTek cards explicitly described as "compatible with all
> PCI-based Power PC Macintosh computers" with "completely self-
> contained
> booting functionality" should probably work equally well.
>
> If you find other add-on sata controller(s) able to boot a PowerMac
> machine, please let me know.
>
> M
>
>
> [1] http://www.sonnettech.com/product/tempo_serial_ata.html
> [2] http://www.firmtek.com/seritek/seritek-1v4/
> [3] http://www.firmtek.com/seritek/seritek-1ve2plus2/
> [4] http://www.firmtek.com/seritek/seritek-1s2/
>
OK... If I'm understanding this correctly, it means that NewWorld
Mac's can boot either from the on-board ATA or one of these OF-
supporting SATA controllers (possibly with some tweaks to ofpath to
deal with any peculiarities of the non-Apple controllers) but *not*
from most non-OF-aware controllers.
I, for one, can live with that as long as I've got some small ATA
drives I can use for the purpose. All I have to put on it is the
"apple bootstrap (HFS) partition" and /boot, right? But root and all
the rest can be on the big SATAs, right?
It's not "beautiful" or elegant, but it is a reasonable work-around
for a problem that we can't fix in the Debian environment.
Or am I missing something?
Rick
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