[Pancutan-devel] Question about booting

[Martín Ferrari]

Hi,

I'm working on a tool for testing the Debian CDs for the Google Summer
of Code (http://pancutan.alioth.debian.org/), this tool will run all
sort of tests over the iso files, and I'm fairly lost about the
different booting methods in powerpc (which I will inspect to be sure
that the cd is bootable in all arches). So as people that know the
architecture, maybe you can give me some pointers, sorry if this is
offtopic here.

So far, I've found that:

- the CDs are build as hybrid ISO9660+hfs, with an APM partition. But
the partition lists a boot area of size 0. What's that partition for?
- the image also has an MBR partition with invalid physical addresses
and I couldn't figure what's for,
- the /install folder is -hfs-blessed, but don't know what that means,
- there is prep boot support, but I don't know the format of the boot
file, nor I could find any information on how this works,
- there is a bootfile.txt file for chrp booting, but don't know if
that is triggered by something else or the OF loads it automatically,
- there is another chrp descriptor called ofboot.b, but I don't know what it is,
- there is a forth script for pegasos, but I don't know how's that loaded,
- the yaboot boot loader is present, but I couldn't find what enables it,
- there is a ElTorito boot descriptor, with invalid checksum, and finally,
- I don't know how these parts relate to each other for each subarch :)

Thanks in advance for anything that you could help me with.

PS: please CC me, I'm not subscribed.

-- 
Martín Ferrari