On Thu, 25 Feb 1999, Hauke Fath wrote:

> At 22:35 Uhr +0100 25.02.1999, Dr. Bill Studenmund wrote:
> 
> >Now that we have a floppy driver in the tree, we could talk about making
> >boot floppies. NetBSD has the technology to make multi-disk boot setups,
> >and we have a sysinst utility which would help with an install.
> >
> >Is the floppy driver up to snuff for this?
> 
> ???

I was more asking if the floppy driver'd be up to snuff for loading
whatever we store on the floppy which the roms don't load. I remember the
driver used to have buffer problems. :-)

> From watching NetBSD/i386 boot, I get the impression that it is more or
> less the BIOSes' job to load the kernel from the boot disk, triggered by a
> tiny boot loader. You'd get a serious problem otherwise, trying to access
> your floppy through a driver that is still on the disk and on the disk
> _only_.
> 
> To copy this scheme, you'd have to find out how to trick the ROM code into
> loading your kernel instead of the MacOS System file from floppy and
> execute it afterwards. No NetBSD iwm driver involved here. Then, you still
> have the problem that a lot of hardware remains uninitialized.

Very true. But if we get the general ability to load a bootloader off of
disk, I think we have the ability to load a bootloader off of floppy. The
same amount of hardware is initialized at that point. :-)

Take care,

Bill