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Installation | KVM or PReP

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Alexander Baldeck edited this page Jan 11, 2022 · 9 revisions

Download the powerpc or powerpc64le ISO

https://archlinuxpower.org/iso/

Although there are ways to install via USB, we assume you burnt it to a CD/DVD and boot of your optical drive or use the ISO with -cdrom on Qemu cmdline or equivalents.

Ensure to chose the correct ISO and kernel for your needs.

bigendian    => powerpc
littleendian => powerpc64le

Create a PPC PReP Boot partition

It should be at least 4MiB in size. Depending on which Grub modules you'd like to generate into the Grub boot image, it may need to be bigger. 32MiB is plenty and you'll likely won't ever need more. (That's similar to what they said about the Apollo Guidance Computer's amount of "RAM" too though).

Use cfdisk or any partition tool you like that is able to handle DOS partition tables & ensure you mark the PPC PReP Boot partition bootable. lsblck should return something along the following.

$ lsblk -o NAME,MAJ:MIN,RM,SIZE,RO,TYPE,MOUNTPOINTS,PARTFLAGS,PARTTYPENAME
NAME   MAJ:MIN RM   SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINTS PARTFLAGS PARTTYPENAME
sr0     11:0    1 460.1M  0 rom                        
vda    254:0    0   128G  0 disk                       
|-vda1 254:1    0     9M  0 part             0x80      PPC PReP Boot
|-vda2 254:2    0 111.7G  0 part /                     Linux
`-vda3 254:3    0  16.2G  0 part [SWAP]                Linux swap / Solaris

Install as base using pacstrap

Modify the target folder to your needs, we assume /mnt here and ad a kernel and grubfor good measure.

$ pacstrap /mnt/ base linux grub

Configure Grub

As above, we assume your PPC PreP Boot partition is /dev/vda1. Once in with arch-chroot you'll simply install Grub after generating /etc/grub/grub.cfg.

$ mount /dev/vda2 /mnt
$ genfstab -U /mnt /mnt/etc/fstab
$ arch-chroot /mnt
$$ grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg
# this one will fail if your PPC PReP Boot partition is too small
$$ grub-install /dev/vda1

Continuation

After you're done with the above, your system should detect the installation and boot Grub. So just configure as normal using the regular Archlinux Installation Guide skipping bootloader specifics.

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