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On Wed, Dec 26, 2001 at 02:48:24PM -0800, Bill Studenmund wrote:
> Hmmmm... I just had my machine open earlier today to add RAM, and I
> thought that the PROM was on its own DIMM (different shape from the
> SDRAM). Also, I thought someone had scavanged PROMs from other machines
> (2.0 and 2.4), and had boot failures follow the 2.4 PROM regardles of
> which MB it was in (there is a MB difference between the early and later
> Beige G3s).

I know the SIMM (pretty sure it's not a DIMM) slot you mean. It's
empty on my (1.0.5) 7500. So the PROM is somewhere else on that
motherboard, though they left themselves an upgrade path (which
they never took?).

> So the changability is there. ;-)

Well, in theory. What are the chances of writing one's own firmware
controller? Can we even get the necessary docs from Apple? (I know
there are "open source" BIOSes for PCs...)

> I don't think so. Certainly for the 1.0.5 machines, the CPU was different.
> They might not have support for different CPUs in different OFs. Also,
> part of our problem initially booting on the Blue & White G3s was they
> used a different Host->PCI chip than the Beige ones, and we had to add
> support.

Sure, but all the OF needs to see is a PCI tree, and it should still
know how to speak to all the correct stuff, shouldn't it?

As far as the processor issue, if OF 1.0.5 is able to deal with any
kind of PPC (including G3 and G4) in a processor slot, it'd be kind
of silly if OF 3 couldn't deal with a 604 or 603...

(I'm well aware that I'm speaking to what things reasonably should
be here, and that reality might be drastically different, especially
with a proprietary hardware vendor.)

> I know OF 3 machines have EEPROMS; thus the firmware updaters. :-)

Sure, but those aren't the ones we want to upgrade. :^>

> I'm not familiar with OpenBoot enough to say, but OF 3 does have some cool
> stuff (like fs views, you can telnet in for debugging, etc.)

Yeah, but OpenBoot's been almost that useable (actually, I'm not
sure even OB on UltraSparcs has those two features, but it
definitely lacks the stupidities and lacks of standardization that
plage OF 1.0.5 and 2.x) since the sparc days, long before Apple even
considered OpenFirmware.

Booting, say, a sparc ELC is significantly easier than booting a
PowerMac 7300. And it's not just because NetBSD/sparc is more mature
than /macppc.

--=20
gabriel rosenkoetter
gr@eclipsed.net

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