Issued:
2013-11-20
Updated:
2013-11-20

RHBA-2013:1561 - yaboot bug fix and enhancement update

Synopsis

yaboot bug fix and enhancement update

Type/Severity

Bug Fix Advisory

Topic

Updated yaboot packages that fix two bugs and add one enhancement are now available for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.

Description

The yaboot packages provide a boot loader for Open Firmware based PowerPC systems. Yaboot can be used to boot IBM eServer System p machines.

This update fixes the following bugs:

  • Previously, the client was overwriting the gateway IP address for the Trivial File Transfer Protocol (TFTP) file transfer. When installing through the network using VLAN tags, the boot failed when the server was in a different IP subnetwork. This update ensures that the rest of the parameter strip can be parsed correctly, and failures no longer occur in the aforementioned scenario. (BZ#903855)

  • As there was not enough room between the first allocation and the bottom of the firmware, user attempts to load a ramdisk failed when the firmware was at 32MB (0200000). This update adds the ability to be able to determine how big the initrd memory will be yaboot . As a result, yaboot can accurately place a buffer in the memory, and ramdisk load failures no longer occur. (BZ#968046)

In addition, this update adds the following enhancement:

  • This update adds GUID Partition Table (GPT) support to yaboot, because previously yaboot supported the DOS partition format which has a limit of up to 2TB for 512B sectors. So even if there are large disks, this limit forces users to format all devices to 2TB. With GPT support in yaboot, users can now use larger disks. (BZ#947101)

Users of yaboot are advised to upgrade to these updated packages, which fix these bugs and add this enhancement.

Solution

Before applying this update, make sure all previously-released errata relevant to your system have been applied.

This update is available via the Red Hat Network. Details on how to use the Red Hat Network to apply this update are available at https://access.redhat.com/site/articles/11258

Affected Products

ProductVersionArch
Red Hat Enterprise Linux for Power, big endian6ppc64

Updated Packages

  • yaboot-1.3.14-43.el6.ppc.rpm
  • yaboot-1.3.14-43.el6.src.rpm

Fixes

(none)

CVEs

(none)

References

(none)

Additional information