Nuno Teixeira wrote:

> My first impression is that I don't need MacOS installed to run NetBSD
> but it seems that I will have to use it in order to booter works. It
> makes some confusion to me running NetBSD on top of MacOS.

NetBSD doesn't run "on top" of MacOS. MacOS is just used as a convenient 
environment to run the booter in.

> Can anyone explain to me why we need it? Why it isn't possible to boot
> NetBSD "normaly" like a PC?

I would imagine it was the most expedient choice when the booter was 
first written.

It should be possible to write a booter that runs right out of the boot 
sector of a floppy or an HFS partition on a hard disk. In fact, if you 
search the mailing list archives you'll see that somebody was actually 
working on this and made some reasonable progress. However, writing such 
a boot loader is a non-trivial activity because there is little 
documentation on how to write bootable software to the Mac ROMs.

So basically, it seems to be ust a matter of "somebody hasn't gotten 
around to it yet". :-)

-- 
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  Michael Zucca - mrz5149@acm.org
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  "I'm too old to use Emacs." -- Rod MacDonald
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