Bill Studenmund drunkenly mumbled...
> 
> Right now, both.

i think i've got it.

> Some of the things I'm doing for macppc will help with a) (like making it
> so that boot loaders can deal w/ MacOS partitioned disks). But the real
> problem is, AFAICT, that we'd still need Mode32.

maybe, maybe not.  we can't get the loader to twiddle the bits? or is the
ROM too agressive to alow us to get in there first.

> NetBSD boot blocks would work, but they'd kick in at the time when the
> ROM's are looking at disk drivers. The problem is that on these older
> machines, we're in 24-bit addressing mode at that point. We've not figured
> out how to get out of 24-bit into 32-bit addressing, previously depending
> on the ROM's to do it for us. :-)

hmm, so we need to either a) make the ROMs chill long enough to NetBSD to get
control and/or b) wewrite the ROMs.  hmm, doesn't sound like fun.

> We've been playing with it on and off for years, with no luck. :-(

if you are fighting the ROMs, then that is understandable.

is there any merit in re-writing the ROMs?  or is that an undertaking that
nobody is will to do?  

ok, let's assume we can find someone who will re-write the ROMs (i know some
really impressive microcode people, but sadly they know nothing about actual
computers since they deal mainly with integrated devices.

anyway, back to our assumption (people to do it), what would be the best way
to do it?  NetBSD doesn't really even use the ROMs right?  so why not make
a ROM that does nothing but put us in 32-bit mode (which may be automatic
with new ROMs) and then looks on the SCSI bus for a NetBSD kernel?

this just may be the easiest way to write a loader as it turns out.

beats me.  i'll look into it.

-wonko