Dan Winship  (danw@helixcode.com) wrote:

>Ignoring the Mac partition support in NetBSD since it's not
>complete...
>
>NetBSD/macppc uses standard NetBSD disklabels, so you partition the
>disk with disklabel. If you want to boot off it, you should run
>installboot (exact invocation is given in the FAQ at least, and maybe
>the install docs), which will create a vestigial Mac partition map as
>well. (Which NetBSD won't use.)
>
>> OF claimed that there was no bootable HFS partition (true enough - I 
>> allocated all FFS+swap partitions). Arrrgh.
>
>If you're booting off whatever:0, it shouldn't be looking for an HFS
>partition. It's possible that installboot will do the wrong thing
>somehow if you run it on a disk that already has a Mac partition map.
>(I'm not sure.)
>
>> Which MacOS tool to use for that?
>
>There's no MacOS tool currently in existence that will let you set up
>the disk to be NetBSD-bootable.

I think this is true, but we're not far from being able to do this.  The 
Mac68k port has a working version of sysinst that will partition the disk 
with and without MacOS partitions.  It's been combined with an 
Installation Kernel, so installation is similar to that of other ports 
which use sysinst.  It should be possible to build it into an 
Installation Kernel for the Macppc port and, since the Apple Partition 
Maps are the same, it should work.  However, the Mac68k port doesn't 
support direct hardware boot so some changes would be needed to add the 
code for writing the bootstrap onto the disk.  Also, the code is still 
being tested and in some cases and on some systems has problems updating 
the Apple Partition Map, but it does seem to work on a fair number of 
systems. (Some of these problems may be in the MI portion of code since 
they mirror problems reported on other ports.)

This is one of the things I was working on for the Macppc (and Mac68k) 
ports, but I've had a number of problems with crashes on my G3 while 
trying to build systems.  I was also out of pocket for some time with an 
injury, but now that I'm back at work (and the Macppc port has made some 
significant progress), I hope to get back on this effort.  I wouldn't 
discourage anyone from taking the mac68k/sysinst code and trying it in an 
Installation kernel on the Macppc port, and would be more than willing to 
offer my help or knowledge since I was the original hacker of the 
mac68k/sysinst code.

-bob