Subject: Re: native NetBSD booter
To: Dr. Bill Studenmund <wrstuden@loki.stanford.edu>
From: Allen Briggs <briggs@canolog.ninthwonder.com>
List: port-mac68k
Date: 01/30/1999 16:50:36
> I believe the alice project, the folks who started the NetBSD/mac68k port,
> used A/UX for bootstraping and initial development. That's why we use A/UX
> partition codes. :-)

Yes, and partially.  They also make sense...  ;-)

> NetBSD/mac68k boots the same way A/UX did - the system starts up in MacOS,
> and then an application boots unix.

It would be possible to actually write a bootblock that would bootstrap
BSD directly.  There are several issues with doing that, but it should
work on any system that will run BSD.  Several things would have to be
worked out first:
	* What information is currently needed from the booter application?
	  - Can it be gathered reliably by a bootblock?
	  - Can it be gathered reliably by a running kernel?  (If so, it
	    should be moved there)
	* A solid document on the startup sequence (partly determined by
	  the ROM/PROM/NVRAM and partly determined by the SCSI[/IDE] probe).
	* For mixed MacOS/NetBSD disks, what to put in the partition
	  table for the driver?  Or just let MacOS take care of that
	  (Hard Disk Toolkit/HD Toolkit/Silverlining/etc).

It would be really cool, but it's not been high on the priority queue
for anyone...  ;-)

-allen

-- 
                    Allen Briggs - briggs@ninthwonder.com
       Try free *nix: http://www.netbsd.org/, http://www.freebsd.org/,
                      http://www.linux.org/, http://www.openbsd.org/