Subject: Re: ofwboot.elf
To: Bill Studenmund <wrstuden@zembu.com>
From: Todd Vierling <tv@wasabisystems.com>
List: port-macppc
Date: 07/09/2001 23:09:25
On Mon, 9 Jul 2001, Bill Studenmund wrote:

: > ofwboot.elf is deprecated.
:
: Uhm, when did this happen?

Informal concensus; it isn't actually official (yet).  Howeverm since
Michael wrote the macppc install notes overhaul, it's pretty much de facto
official for 1.5.1 and -current.  There's a pending task with no owner out
there to make the build not install ofwboot.elf into /usr/mdec, only the
xcoff version.

The reason's really simple:  few people really care what file format the
bootloader uses, since it's almost always in a system-dependent format
anyway.  But many people care about booting (possibly multiple) machines,
and too many have been bitten by confusion over which bootloader to use.
It's confusing enough already with different OFW syntax.

The simple solution here is to avoid the confusion and use only ofwboot.xcf.
ELF advocacy is not really good justification for making it more confusing
than it needs to be.

(Of course, the long term solution is to switch to a booter like BootX that
can boot on everything and bypass the need to go to OFW and type in
commands.)

-- 
-- Todd Vierling <tv@wasabisystems.com>  *  Wasabi NetBSD:  Run with it.
-- NetBSD 1.5 now available on CD-ROM  --  http://www.wasabisystems.com/