At 3:26 AM -0400 10/19/00, you wrote:

:)Anyway, I've been collecting information to add to the docs regarding
:)booting, but I find that the stories told are disparate and
:)inconsistent.

[g].  Yeah, I agree.  I'll be rewriting the INSTALL.* documents in the next
week or so using the info I've been collecting for a while now.

The impression I get is that a) the current docs are unclear, missing
important information, and contradictory (meaning people don't follow all
the steps necessary since it's not clear what they need to do) and b)
snapshots are infrequent and some hardware that used to work fine does not
now work (such as MESH and ESP).

I'm hoping that once the INSTALL docs are rewritten clearly and some of the
more common hardware issues are documented, the number of installation
problems will rapidly decline.

:)I'd like to ask if people could, instead of just
:)reporting that a particular model works with a particular
:)OpenFirmware version, report what they use to boot (SystemDisk or
:)OF), what they're booting off of (HFS, CD, floppy), and model and OF
:)version.

I think I've got almost all of that info already in:
<http://www.netbsd.org/Ports/macppc/models.html>
<http://www.netbsd.org/Ports/macppc/faq.html#boot-support>

What I'm missing is a list of OF devices.  In particular, I'd ultimately
like to add a column to models.html listing the OF device to use to boot
from the internal HD and CD on each model.  I think most of the devaliases
are the same for each OF version, but I'm not entirely sure.

If you want to tackle this, it'd save me a lot of time freeing me to work
on describing how to deal with OF in INSTALL.*

:)In addition, if anyone out there would like to work on PPC 601
:)support, I have a 100 MHz 601 card for a PCI Mac (I believe it's from
:)a 7500). Tell me you're going to actually try to get 601 stuff going
:)in NetBSD, and I'll ship it to you.

Cool, there are only five models we could support that we don't currently
(7200, 7500, iMac (summer 2000), iBook (FireWire), and TAM).  Getting 601
support would get two of those working.

  -- MW