[06:17] <slangasek> infinity: ok, in that case it sounds like it's still appropriate for partman-prep to enforce the partition layout, even if it's not required by OPAL
[06:17] <slangasek> infinity: what does OPAL use to boot, then?
[06:26] <infinity> slangasek: petitboot mounts everything it can find and scans for grub and yaboot configs, parses them, and gives you the boot menu.  When you pick one, it shuts down its execution environment and kexecs.
[06:26] <infinity> slangasek: Long story short, it's gross. :P
[06:27] <infinity> slangasek: So, we use grub *userspace* because we're still responsible for feeding petitboot a grub.cfg to parse, but the actual grub bootloader never gets touched.
[06:28] <infinity> slangasek: But it's insane to install and QA two different install methods for the sake of saving a tiny bit of space on disk (and there are other advantages to uniformity, like portable images, or debugging with the "qemu -hda /dev/sda" trick), so yeah, just makes sense to always pretend the PReP bit is needed.
[06:33] <infinity> slangasek: This is, incidentally, why I also remained perpetually confused by people working on a ppc64el port of the bootloader bits of grub.  Because, yes, some future version of SLOF might be able to load that some day (maybe), but current OF and SLOF expect to jump into a 32-bit BE bootloader, so as long as those machine and that firmware exists, a 64-bit bootloader is pointless.
[06:33] <infinity> slangasek: If we want to retain the uniform image/install advantages, anyway.