On Wed, 13 Oct 1999, Todd Whitesel wrote:

> Has anyone looked into the possibility of creating a bootstrapper program
> that could be located on a local HFS disk, which would simply turn around
> and use OF to find the NetBSD partition and load a real kernel from it?

Yes. We'd really want to use ofwboot.elf

> I'm thinking of something like the 'boot wd0a:netbsd in 5 seconds' banner
> that initially comes up when you boot an i386 machine.

You'd have to add that to ofwboot... That's a seperate issue to making the
G3's boot right. Not to say that it's wrong, just a seperate issue. :-)

> This would allow us to do proper local booting of iMac's and G3's, even if
> it means having a teeny HFS partition so the booter has somewhere to live.
> (We could set up that partition on one machine and 'dd' the image into a
> file for use by the NetBSD installation goo for macppc.)

I did one of the first steps towards this recently. Macppc now understands
MacOS partitions, so it's much easier to set up partitioning which lives
w/ the booter. :-)

Besides teaching sysinst how to deal with this, I think the only thing we
need to do is teach libsa how to deal with MacOS partitions. :-)

Take care,

Bill