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