On Tue, 14 Nov 2000, Danny Thomas wrote:

> SUGGESTION trivial
> ==========
> could mention that ofwboot.xcf & ofwboot.elf are identical and differ only
> in being XCOFF/ELF format respectively. Can you use ELF with all versions
> of OF?

ELF only works with OF 3.

> NEEDS QUALIFYING
> ================
> There's no description of what either the OF boot command really does, nor
> what the ofwboot bootloader does - even the draft manpage doesn't really
> describe why the bootloader is needed. An example where this description
> might help is near bottom of p15. It says "OF3 systems can load the kernel
> without the use of a bootloader". I suspect this will not work with gzipped
> kernels - at least I got some msg about wrong format. I'm guessing one
> feature of the NetBSD bootloader not in the OF 'boot' command is
> recognizing and unzipping binaries before loading them

Yes, the boot loader can deal with gzipped files while boot can't.

> TIP?
> ====
> it says the HFS{+} partition could be as high as 9. If you're quick, you
> can actually see the partition number when doing a 'mac-boot' - assuming
> you want to run the bootloader off the startup MacOS volume. You see the
> one line command need middle of screen ending something like "...disk@0:5
> \tlxi"

I think that while you're right, most folks would have difficulty doing
that.

> SUGGESTION
> ==========
> I suspect its not available, but is there an 'ls' under OF or the bootloader?
> It would really help when your attempts to boot off a CDROM fail - "file
> not found".  There's just too many variables - have I got the device spec
> right? have I guessed the ISO9660 mangled name properly? did I burn CD
> right?

There is an "ls" command, but it doesn't list file systems. It lists the
OF device tree.

Take care,

Bill