Subject: Re: a bunch of macppc stuff
To: Bill Studenmund , Dan Winship <danw@MIT.EDU>
From: Henry B. Hotz <hotz@jpl.nasa.gov>
List: port-macppc
Date: 06/21/1999 16:37:35
At 2:07 PM -0700 6/20/99, Bill Studenmund wrote:
>On Sat, 19 Jun 1999, Dan Winship wrote:
>>    Perhaps on the 1.5 CD (assuming there will be such a thing), we can
>>    install a hacked ofwboot as /macppcboot or something, with the path
>>    to the macppc install kernel hard-coded into it so that people
>>    could just "boot cd:0,macppcboot". Of course, users would still
>>    have to deal with getting into Open Firmware. It would be neat to
>>    make the CD actually bootable without having to enter Open
>>    Firmware, but that might require having an HFS partition, which
>>    might not be possible. Anyone have any relevant clues?
>
>I'm looking into what the CHRP machines will do with multi-boot. I think
>we can support it easily. I'm not sure how to get the CD to be bootable if
>we need MacOS - we'd need a license for that. :-(
>
>But please look into it if you want!
>
>>    It might also be useful to get BootVariables working on newer
>>    machines if there's anyone out there with the relevant MacOS
>>    programming clue. (I don't remember where the source comes from,
>>    but it's out there on the net somewhere.)
>

Correct me if I'm wrong, but can't you use BootVariables to tell OF where
the boot file is and boot directly from an ISO9660 CD-ROM, independent of
any other ports on the disk.  That is, can't you give OF a full path name
to boot from?  This would not require MacOS (or license) and should not
require the user to use the OF command line.

Perhaps the ISO support is broken, like so many other things.  Perhaps
there is some problem I don't know about in the second stage of the boot
process?

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