On Wed, Jan 02, 2002 at 05:35:21PM -0500, Nyef wrote:
> Then the systems that work differently can use the MacOS booter until we
> figure out what's going on with them and work around it.  Even saying
> "yes, you can boot without MacOS, but only on an SE/30" is an improvement
> over the current situation.

Absolutely.

> On a related subject, would it be feasable to use a BSD-type partition
> table if MacOS isn't going to be installed on the system? (the boot code
> would have to be modified to use the SCSI Manager directly, but that
> shouldn't be too hard...)

I'm not entirely sure since I haven't looked at the docs in a while,
but that's up to the ROM, really.  The ROM loads a certain amount of
information before executing code, and I think it will give chimes of
death if it doesn't see an apple partition map.

> Is there an actual list somewhere of what this information is, or must it
> be grubbed out of the booter source?

Grubbed out of the booter source (it's mostly (all?) in one place,
IIRC) or out of the kernel.

> > 	4. Early machines may not be in 32-bit mode and will have to be
> > 	   switched, if possible.
> There's an API for this (SetMMUMode), which is known to be used by some
> NuBus video card drivers.

Yes.  I think, though, that earlier systems require Mode32 in order to
actually present this API.  I'm not really sure, though.  This stuff is
getting fuzzier all the time...  ;-)

> Actually, I've been wondering. Why is it that the Booter requires the
> system to be in 32-bit mode anyway, given the existance of this API?

Good question--probably because we didn't want to do the work to support
a mode switch just prior to boot.

> I'm still here, and still bash on it occasionally

Cool!

-allen

-- 
 Allen Briggs                     briggs@wasabisystems.com
 http://www.wasabisystems.com/    Quality NetBSD CDs, Sales, Support, Service
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