On Mon, Jun 25, 2001 at 09:30:25AM -0400, gabriel rosenkoetter wrote:
> 
> If someone's going to go and change the documentation on this one,
> could we word it maybe more like this (no personal insult to Makoto
> Fujiwara intended; I'm a native English speaker and I'm presuming he
> is not):
> 
>   The boot loader (ofwboot.elf or ofwboot.xcf) is capable of reading
>   the kernel from either a 4.2BSD or HFS/HFS+ partition,

Is this accurate?  I was under the impression at the ofwboot.* boot
loader could only read *BSD and ISO-9660 filesystems (plus tftp), and
NOT HFS/HFS+.  OpenFirmware, on the other hand, can read from HFS &
HFS+ filesystems, but not *BSD ones.  Perhaps newer ofwboot (newer
than 1.2) can read HFS/HFS+?

From the original post:

> > I read this:
> > 
> > "HFS or HFS+ file system (Open Firmware 2.4, Open Firmware 3)
> > 
> > Whilst you can load ofwboot.xcf from an HFS or HFS+ partition, you will
> > not be able to load the kernel from HFS or HFS+ filesystems. This will be
> > resolved in a future release of NetBSD/macppc"
> > 
> > then, a few bits downstream, I read this:
> > 
> > "Boot off an HFS or HFS+ partition (Open Firmware 3)
> > 
> > Download the install kernel installation/netbsd.ram.gz and place it at
> > the top level of any partition. Use a MacOS utility such as Stuffit
> > Expander to uncompress the kernel. Get to the Open Firmware prompt. Boot
> > the kernel directly (i.e. without the use of a bootloader) and use it to
> > install NetBSD on your hard drive."

So assuming ofwboot can't read HFS/HFS+, then there is no
contradiction, although these paragraphs are a bit unclear.  The first
paragraph states that OpenFirware can load ofwboot.xcf from HFS/HFS+,
but that *ofwboot.xcf* (rather than "you") in turn can't read the
kernel from HFS/HFS+ (so the kernel will have to be read from
somewhere else: a *BSD partition, an ISO cd-rom, or over the net).
The second paragraph states (not in so many words) that since
OpenFirware (v.3) can load ELF files directly, the bootloader isn't
necessary (in theory), and so OpenFirmware can load the kernel
directly from any filesystem it can read (in particular, HFS/HFS+).
However, since the kernel can't mount HFS/HFS+ filesystems, for this
to be useful, one has to boot an *install* kernel which has an
integrated RAM-based filesystem as its root fs, which the kernel can
mount.

John