At 1:51 Uhr +0100 26.02.1999, Dr. Bill Studenmund wrote:
>On Thu, 25 Feb 1999, Hauke Fath wrote:

[boot floppies]

>> >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. :-)

For quite some time -- see
<http://mail-index.netbsd.org/port-mac68k/1998/06/08/0000.html> .  =8)

I doubt Scott would have checked in the code if it had show-stopper bugs.
My "???" was more related to the idea of using the floppy driver during a
native boot process.

>> 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. :-)

Well -
	while you have the ROM at hand,
	while you have basic MacOS data structures initialized and
	while you have even already accessed the floppy with ROM code
		- to get the boot sector, that is

-- why not simply fire up the Device Manager, access .Sony and read in the
kernel? Why would you want to use a _NetBSD_ device driver in that
situation? There is no kernel running at that moment, is there? Or, what
important detail am I missing?

	hauke


--
"It's never straight up and down"     (DEVO)