Here I write a little bit about my experiences running GRUB2 with a PowerPC Mac (actually, an iBook G4), since the current documentation is lacking in many places (outdated, incorrect, etc.).

Some of what I say is platform agnostic, though, and may be of interest to users of GRUB in general.

Basics using GRUB2 with PowerPC

First of all, it is important to understand (at least superficially) how botting on a Mac works.

One of the first programs that run in your Mac is the OpenFirmware. It works with more or less the same purpose of a BIOS in a regular x86 system. The basic idea is the same: get the computer running with whatever programs you want it to run. The implementation, though, differs quite a bit.

First of all, OpenFirmware (OF) usually presents itself as a command-line interface that is programmable, differently from the common day BIOSes from x86 boxes. As it is programmable, it is more flexible, but this flexibility comes at the price of an increased complexity.

I may write some things more in a future article, if there is any interest.

For now, it just suffices to say that to get to the OF prompt in a Mac, you have to press a combination keys during the time that your Mac gives a chime when you turn it on. At that moment, you have to press (simulaneously) Cmd + Option + O + F. (Note: the Cmd key is the key that has an Apple drawn on it, usually on the side of the space bar).

Limitations of Open Firmware

Differently from usual BIOSes of x86 computers, Open Firmware can read the contents of a partition in your HD (or other devices), as long as it is formatted in the original HFS format (not in HFS+ or one of its descendents).

This is the reason why some older versions of Linux create an HFS partition in your HD, even if you don't intent to run or use anything besides Linux. The yaboot bootloader consists of, among other things, one binary that is understandable by OpenFirmware. That binary is a file called yaboot, after the name of the booloader.

As an aside, you have to indicate to OF what is the file that you want it to load during the boot process, so that it knows what to do. The way to indicate this is to "bless" the file (and the folder that contains it). Some ways to bless a file are to, for example, use the bless command in MacOS X or the hattrib -b command from hfsutils.

Files in an HFS filesystem have two attributes that many other filesystems don't: a creator ID (the "application" that created the file) and the type ID (which determines what kind of file it is).

OpenFirmware, in particular, looks for files with the type tbxi for the bootstrap process.

The yaboot binary is loaded by OF into memory and, then, control is passed to the yaboot program, which then reads its configuration file (yaboot.conf) from the same folder where the binary was in. The file yaboot.conf contains instructions for yaboot to do its job. The file yaboot.conf is very similar in construction to configurations of an older bootloader for x86 computers, lilo.conf.

Also, in a way similar to what LILO requires, after you install some new kernel, change some parameter in the configuration file, etc., you have to run a program that will set up everything so that the boot process can know of your new configuration. With LILO, this command was called lilo, while with yaboot the command is called ybin (which, essentially, takes care of putting yaboot.conf in the bootstrap/HFS partition and blesses the yaboot binary).

Going to GRUB2

One of the characteristics of yaboot (which is left as an exercise to the reader to determine if it is a drawback or not) is exactly the way that changes in the configuration have to be copied to the special HFS partition: the step of running ybin.

GRUB2 (and its older sibling, GRUB legacy) do away with that: during boot-time, it can understand the filesystems that you have in your computer and interactively load whatever you want from there, also from a command-line like OF, before any (regular) operating system has even been started.

But how do you start GRUB2? Well, the way that this is performed is copying a binary to that special HFS partition. Here things start to be hairy, because GRUB2 has a lot of functionality, but it comes at the price of it consuming a lot of space (especially if you are using encrypted partitions or some kind of logical volume managements with some journalling filesystem that allows files to be compressed etc. on top of it). The list goes on.

Usually, that special HFS partition only has 800KB, which, BTW, is the size of an old 3.5" floppy used with older Macs (note: due to some contraints on partitions and aligments of such partitions on cylinders, it is not uncommon for disk partitioning software to create partitions slighly larger than 800KB, but not much larger than that).

A full-featured binary of GRUB2 to be placed on that HFS partition can have much more than those 800KB. But how do you get that binary, in the first place? And how do you fit that in the HFS partition?

Creating the GRUB2 binary

To answer the first question, you have to construct it from your grub-ieee1275 package (I'm assuming here that you are using Debian or Ubuntu, but similar instructions may apply to other distributions). Then, a first step would be to create such binary with:

 mkdir /tmp/foo
 cd /tmp/foo
 cp -a /usr/lib/grub/powerpc-ieee1275/* .
 grub-mkimage -O powerpc-ieee1275 -o ../grub.img *.mod

The last command of these create an executable named grub.img that is callable from OF and which contains every module from grub-ieee1275. This executable that I call here grub.img is called, in GRUB2 parlance, the core image and it it seems to be named core.img in many systems.

On my system, with those commands, the binary grub.img is about 1208KB, which is 50% larger than that 800KB partition. And you would like it to be much smaller, becase you want to still have your yaboot bootloader by default while you are evaluating your bootloaders (or using it as a backup plan).

As GRUB2 follow a modular design, you can mix and match the features that you want. This already hints you to the way we can fit it in the HFS partition, and it is always the same story: just trim the fat.

Creating the configuration file

You will also have to have GRUB2 configuration's file (or you will have to play with way more commands than you'd want to). An important distinction here is that you usually have 2 or more partitions on your Mac:

• the special bootstrap/HFS partition where OF is going to look at (I'll call it /dev/hda2 here);
• the partition where your / filesystem resides (denoted by /dev/hda3 here);
• some partition to hold /boot (I don't have one of these, but let's say that it is /dev/hda7 for our discussion purposes), usually containing your kernels and initial ramdisks.
• other partitions.

With this in mind, you can With Let's say that this last one, in Linux parlance, is /dev/hda3 (as is the case of this author), and optionally a partition where your Linux kernel resides (people usually use it to store the /boot subtree of a Linux filesystem). Let's say that this last one is /dev/hda7.

Then, you would compose something like the following as a configuration file for GRUB2 (named grub.cfg):

insmod part_apple
insmod ext2
set root='(hd,apple7)'

menuentry "Linux" {
    linux /vmlinux root=/dev/hda3
    initrd /initrd
}

There are one two important points here that deserve more comments:

• Note that, differently from a regular x86 system, in a Mac system with only one HD the way that you specify an HD does not have a trailing zero. For instance, in the case above of the variable root, we have (hd,apple7), while in a "common PC" we would have the (hd part replaced with (hd0.

  That's something that you should make your distribution aware of, if they aren't yet.

  As an addendum, I don't know how it works with systems with more than one HD, as I only have (PowerPC) Macs that are notebooks. If you can share any experiences, please do.

• One point of caution here: what GRUB2 calls root is not necessarily the root of your filesystem (i.e., the partition that holds /), but the device that everything that is "not fully qualified" is interpreted as being relative to.

  The "not fully qualified" above means anything that is not prefixed with GRUB's device notation. As an example, (hd,apple2)/boot/vmlinux if fully qualified for GRUB's purpose, while /boot/vmlinux is not.

Putting it all together

The next step is to just copy the files grub.img and grub.cfg to the special HFS partition. You can do that using hmount, hcopy, and humount or you can use the regular Linux hfs module to copy to that partition.

Then, boot your system, get into the OF prompt and execute:

boot hd:2,grub.img

Here, the 2 above is a reference to my HFS partition. Substitute that with yours, appropriately. You will then see the common (familiar?) GRUB prompt and, from there, everything else that you know will (hopefully) work.

The list of modules that "Works for Me(TM)"

As I mentioned above, I use a subset of all modules that come with grub-ieee1275 to create my grub.img binary. Here is the list of modules that I use and that gives me a reasonably sized bootloader:

bitmap.mod        datehook.mod  gzio.mod         lsmmap.mod      reboot.mod          terminal.mod
bitmap_scale.mod  datetime.mod  halt.mod         memdisk.mod     regexp.mod          test.mod
blocklist.mod     echo.mod      help.mod         memrw.mod       relocator.mod       trig.mod
boot.mod          elf.mod       hexdump.mod      minicmd.mod     scsi.mod            true.mod
bufio.mod         ext2.mod      hfs.mod          msdospart.mod   search.mod          video.mod
cat.mod           fat.mod       hfsplus.mod      normal.mod      search_fs_file.mod  video_fb.mod
cmp.mod           font.mod      ieee1275_fb.mod  part_apple.mod  search_fs_uuid.mod  videoinfo.mod
configfile.mod    fshelp.mod    linux.mod        part_msdos.mod  search_label.mod
cpio.mod          gettext.mod   loadenv.mod      parttool.mod    setjmp.mod
crypto.mod        gfxmenu.mod   loopback.mod     probe.mod       sleep.mod
date.mod          gfxterm.mod   ls.mod           read.mod        suspend.mod

Just for the record, my grub.img file has 624KB, and that can certainly be shrunk.

The command line that "Works for Me(TM)" to create the image

Actually, I lied when I told you that I used the lines above to create my grub.img file, because I'm lazy and I don't want to type the .img extension. I also embed my configuration file in the binary that I create with GRUB2, so that I don't have two files to copy to my HFS partition, but only one. I do that with:

grub-mkimage -c grub.cfg -o ../grub -O powerpc-ieee1275 -d . *.mod

OK. No more lies here.

The nice aspect of GRUB is that one you install that image, you don't have to touch that HFS partition anymore: you simply update your regular filesystem's /boot/grub/grub.cfg file (which is usually performed when you install a new kernel, at least with Debian) and you're ready to go.

The good way to do that is to use a minimal configuration file embedded in your grub binary in your HFS partition that will hook into the system's /boot/grub/grub.cfg to read newer kernels and leave the HFS partition (and your system's NVRAM) alone.

Here is what I am using right now:

search --no-floppy --fs-uuid --set=root 35d26869-f7c9-4852-a9b8-100314560c34
set prefix=($root)/boot/grub
configfile /boot/grub/grub.cfg

You will, of course, want to modify the file above as you install newer kernels (perhaps even that unsupported operating system from that fruity company, who knows?). Don't forget to change the UUID's, and partition numbers to fit your needs.

Well, that's it. I hope that it helps somebody out there, as the information that I got otherwise was way outdated, incomplete, etc. to keep up with GRUB2 from these days. Now, let's go patch the tools that we have so that not everybody who wants to use GRUB2 have to learn about its workings.

Oh, of course, you can now have your kernels in ext4, btrfs, xfs etc. partitions without the fear that your bootloader won't load them.