ppc64 (mac) netboot

[David Woodhouse]

On Thu, 2007-08-09 at 18:37 -0700, Roland McGrath wrote:
> Ages ago, I used to netboot my Mac G5 all the time.  
> It's been a while since I've had any luck with that.  Help?
> 
> My server-side stuff still works, don't bother asking.
> 
> What I used to do is have the tftp'd file be yaboot.  It would tftp
> yaboot.conf and present the menu items I set up.  One of these could be e.g.:
> 
> image=enet:,/fc/4/mac64/vmlinuz
> 	label=fc4-mac64
> 	initrd=enet:,/fc/4/mac64/ramdisk.image.gz
> 	append="maxcpus=1 ramdisk_size=8192"
> 	read-only
> 
> and this worked peachy.  I was able to get there by using the four-finger
> salute at chime time and typing "boot enet:,", or by getting to the first
> stage of on-disk yaboot and hitting 'n'.  I could even do it by holding 'n'
> at chime time, or option and clicking the globe, and then type blind at the
> yaboot command line while the screen stayed frozen in Macintoshy graphics
> mode until the boot started.
> 
> I can still get my menu, but it never leads to a happy installer boot any
> more (unless I want to reinstall FC4).  Maybe since FC5 or so.  At some
> point, the netboot images changed from vmlinuz+initrd.img to the one
> ppc64.img.  

You can still attempt to boot separate kernel and initrd; you don't
_have_ to use the 'netboot' image. 

I suspect the problem is caused by the size of the newer images. A
smaller image would probably work.

You can create the 'ppc64.img' from the kernel+initrd by using the
'mkzimage' script. If you edit /usr/share/ppc64-utils/zImage.lds to
change the address at which the resulting image is linked, does that
help? Try moving it to 16MiB?

-- 
dwmw2