Documentation PPC Specific Content Beat

PPC Specifics for Fedora

This section covers specific information about Fedora and the PPC hardware platform.

• Genesi Pegasos II / Efika 5200B

The Fedora kernel supports both Pegasos and Efika without the need to use the "Device Tree Supplement" from powerdeveloper.org. However, the lack of full support for ISO9660 in the firmware means that booting via yaboot from the CD is not possible. Boot the 'netboot' image instead, either from the CD or over the network. Because of the size of the image, you must set the firmware'sload-base variable to load files at a high address such as 32MiB instead of the default 4MiB:

setenv load-base 0x2000000

At the OpenFirmware prompt, enter the following command to boot the Efika update, if necessary, or the netboot image from the CD:

boot cd: /images/netboot/ppc32.img

Or from the network:

boot eth ppc32.img

You must also manually configure OpenFirmware to make the installed Fedora system bootable. To do this, set the boot-device and boot-file environment variables appropriately, to load yaboot from the /boot partition. For example, a default installation might require the following:

setenv boot-device hd:0
setenv boot-file /yaboot/yaboot
setenv auto-boot? true

• PA Semi Electra

The Electra firmware does not yet support yaboot; to install on Electra, you can boot the ppc64.img netboot image. After the installation, you will need to manually configure the firmware to load the installed kernel and initrd from the /boot partition.

Refer to the firmware documentation for further details.

• Sony PlayStation 3

For installation on PlayStation 3, first update to firmware 1.60 or later. The "Other OS" boot loader must be installed into the flash, following the instructions at http://www.playstation.com/ps3-openplatform/manual.html. A suitable boot loader image can be found on Sony's "ADDON" CD, available from ftp://ftp.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/people/geoff/cell/.

Once the boot loader is installed, the PlayStation 3 should be able to boot from the Fedora install media. Please note that network installation works best with NFS, since that takes less memory than FTP or HTTP methods. Using the text option also reduces the amount of memory taken by the installer.

For more info on Fedora and the PlayStation3 or Fedora on PowerPC in general, join the Fedora-PPC mailing list (http://lists.infradead.org/mailman/listinfo/fedora-ppc) or the #fedora-ppc channel on FreeNode (http://freenode.net/).

• Network booting

Combined images containing the installer kernel and ramdisk are located in the images/netboot/ directory of the installation tree. They are intended for network booting with TFTP, but can be used in many ways.

The yaboot loader supports TFTP booting for IBM pSeries and Apple Macintosh. The Fedora Project encourages the use of yaboot over the netboot images.

PPC Specific packages

• The ppc64-utils package has been split out into individual packages reflecting upstream packaging (ps3pf-utils, powerpc-utils, powerpc-utils-papr). Although the mkzimage command is no longer supplied, you can use the wrapper script from the kernel-bootwrapper package:

wrapper -i initrd-${KERN_VERSION}.img -o zImage-${KERN_VERSION}.img vmlinuz-${KERN_VERSION}

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