On Mon, 18 Oct 1999, Todd Whitesel wrote:

> So mark me down as an eager tester for Apple Partition Map support.

Cool. Though the testing we need is not in the kernel. The two places that
need work are:

1) ofwboot. That's what the program I sent out is about, though I really
should have only sent it to mac-68k. Since macppc hasn't been using the
MacOS partitioning scheme long, there's not much back-compatability to
break. :-)

Readers well-versed in ofwboot, will note that the userstrat routine takes
the exact same parameters as the strategy routine in ofdev.c. ;-) Once I'm
sure the new routine is bug-compatable with the old, I'll teach libsa
(used in "stand alone" applications, like boot loaders) how to use it, and
so ofwboot should be able to read MacOS partition tables.

We'll need to have ofwboot on an HFS partition, but it should be able to
load a kernel off of an ffs fileystem once it's up.

2) userland. I need more help here. installboot needs to not blow away
MacOS partition tables that it didn't make. Also, it'd be nice for it to
be able to look at an exisint MacOS partition table and find the partition
containing its boot blocks and update them there. So on an OF 1.X.Y class
machine, you can use MacOS partitioning and installboot will shove the
boot blocks into one of the MacOS partitions, leaving all others alone.

Also, it'd be nice to teach sysinst how to do macos partitioning. Colin
Wood has done some work for mac68k towards this which would probasbly be a
good starting point.

For now, I think you should be able to net boot a kernel, have it ask
where root is, and then use the on-disk root filesystem.

Take care,

Bill