On Wed, 18 Oct 2000, Chris Tribo wrote:

> On Wed, 18 Oct 2000, Todd Vierling wrote:
> 
> > If the XCOFF loader is supposed to work under all OFW's, then effort should
> > be put towards making it work properly.  A unified booter is a definite goal
> > of NetBSD; that type of thing was done with a little Magic on the sparc port
> > (where sun4 and sun4c/m boot very differently).
> 
> 	OK, agreed. Um how? First we need an ofwboot.xcf that is compiled
> at the right address. Can someone explain as to why it ofwboot.xcf is
> compiled at 0x6c0000 when it should be 0x600000. There are only two or

Because untill recently we told everyone who used it to use 6c0000.

> three people that seem to know enough about low level IO and bootstrapping
> to even discuss any of this, and they appear to be busy doing other 
> things. There are also some larger hurdles to overcome, like mesh not
> working right, not being able to load large kernels on older machines,
> loads of OFW version/machine specific info, and making NetBSD happy with
> HFS && HFS+

Large kernels on older machines == change real-base. :-)

> > We can certainly have an ELF loader, but if all *current* OFW's support the
> > XCOFF loader, focusing on XCOFF makes the booting instructions a bit
> > simpler.
> 
> 	Not to mention makefiles, as long as we're on the subject:

Making ofwboot.elf is pretty simple, so I doubt we'll stop making it. :-)

> 	What we also need is something like vax or i386 with a five second
> countdown , and the smarts to let boot disks span across multiple
> floppies.

Well, that support is in libsa (for multi-floppy support), so it shouldn't
be hard. Also, it was only recently that our boot kernels started
overflowing a floppy.

Take care,

Bill