Live image ppc and ppc64 support

[David Woodhouse]

On Wed, 2007-08-15 at 15:59 -0400, Jeremy Katz wrote:
> Okay, I've finally gotten around to merging dwmw2's changes for ppc
> support in livecd-creator.  First off, thanks for getting the ball
> rolling.

Ah, cool. Thanks.

> Of course, now the fun part is that it would be nice to be able to
> support both ppc and ppc64 with the images.  There are a few barriers to
> that as it currently stands.  

Indeed. I was planning to get to that after we'd got the groundwork
merged.

> The biggest is probably that the ppc and ppc64 kernels currently
> conflict.  The actual vmlinuz files as well as the modules end up under
> the same paths.  Without that fixed, it's a bit of a non-starter.  Maybe
> it finally makes sense to make the paths depend on uname -m in addition
> to uname -r?  Other ideas?

That was certainly one of the potential solutions I'd thought of. Others
were more hackish, like installing each kernel into its own chroot and
then setting up a symlink as early as possible in boot so
that /lib/modules/$(uname -r) points to the right place. And after the
installation to a real hard drive, you _move_ the appropriate one into
the right place and delete the other.

It would be nice if whatever solution we settle on ends up with only the
'proper' kernel installed, not both. Not mandatory though, I suppose --
as long as yum isn't going to keep updating both, and letting the user
boot the 'wrong' ones. 

I suppose one way to help with that particular problem would be to put a
hack into yaboot where we can mark each boot option as 32-bit or 64-bit,
and then have yaboot filter out the ones which aren't appropriate to the
system we're running on at the time. That would actually be cute for the
straight DVD install on non-Mac too.

But if we can avoid having the 'wrong' kernels installed even alongside
the 'right' kernel, when we've installed from LiveCD, that's probably
the best answer. Right?

If we can change the $(uname -r) so that kernels and install them in
parallel, presumably you'll rpm -e the unwanted one after install?

> If we get that fixed, the livecd-creator side of things shouldn't be
> that bad to do.  Mainly just making it so that we handle multiple
> kernels (which kanarip has a patch for, just need to finish getting it
> into a merge-ready state) and then a little of the 3264 logic out of
> anaconda's scripts.

Cool. I should be home this weekend, and in a position to screw with it
on various 32-bit and 64-bit hardware (including PS3, although PS3 is a
bit too memory-starved to be running swapless).

-- 
dwmw2