We are putting together a list of items that need attention in the
bootloader. At the moment the list is as follows:

Short term:

1)  Change !BtRiscBSD so that it boots NetBSD is the screen
    mode that the machine is running in rather than using
    the current default of 1024 by 768 unless there is a
    screen mode defined in the configuration file.

2)  Change !BtRiscBSD to detect if the machine has video RAM
    or not and to fill in a suitable value in the 'Video DRAM'
    writable icon if the machine does not have any. At the
    moment this is set to zero which catches out people who use
    machines such as A7000s, who find themselves trying to
    boot a machine with no screen memory.

Medium term:

3)  Change !BtRiscBSD to verify that the NetBSD partition address
    defined in the disk bootblock does not overlap the RISC OS
    partition. Fill in a value for the partition address if
    none is found (this will be the rest of the disk after the
    RISC OS partition). Add support for cases where the RISC OS
    partitions is larger that four gigabytes.

Longer term:

4)  Add support for gzip'ed kernels.

5)  Add ELF support for when/if NetBSD/arm32 moves to ELF format
    object files.

6)  At the moment the bootloader cannot handle more than four
    areas of physical memory. On machines with a Kinetic card
    there can be more than this and the bootloader can go wrong.
    The first step will be to add a check to the bootloader so
    that it ignores anything after the first four areas. In
    the longer term the bootloader will be modified to support
    greater than this number but this will require NetBSD kernel
    changes as well.

7)  Work towards a unified NetBSD/arm32 and NetBSD/arm26 bootloader?

Trivial:

8)  Rename !BtRiscBSD' as '!BtNetBSD'.

Does anybody else have any more suggestions or comments on the above
list?

Dave Daniels