I have a question about ofwboot.xcf and its capabilities.

I Know ofwboot.xcf needs to be booted from some media
that is supported by ofw, like cdrom, hfs[+], floppy, etc. and
not from an ffs partition. The question is whether ofwboot.xcf
can then get the kernel from an ffs partition. If so, how would
I go about this? I have tried a great many things to no avail.

What I have observed:

1) i can not use any flags on the boot command line, as it trashes
the kernel name. ie:  "boot cd:,ofwboot.xcf netbsd.GENERIC_MD -a"
will drop me into a boot: prompt from ofwboot.xcf from which I
need to reenter "netbsd.GENERIC_MD -a" in order to get the
system to boot.

2) It appears that with my system, i NEED to use the netbsd.GENERIC_MD
kernel whether or not I use the included ramdisk, as the other kernels
will not boot. Something about the load address? My system is a
new 1GHz dual G4 with 512MB. Even with this kernel, after I repartitioned
my hard drive, I had difficulty getting this kernel to boot, so 
something weird
is happening. The message was about something being locked,  and
I didn't write it down.

3) Installation on this system is confusing, to say the least. I would 
have
managed a manual install, except that there was no tar command on the
sysinst disk, and I don't have familiarity with pax. Apparently sysinst 
does
a command like "pax -zrpe -f /mnt2/binary/sets/base.tgz" to unpack a set.

4) I had to manually do newfs on my partitions before sysinst would 
bother to
unpack sets onto the hard drive. A case of "you can't get theyar from 
heyar, you
gotta go someplace else firrest". Even then, there is a misleading error 
message
after each newfs command about not being able to update the disklabel, if
you have apple style partitions. By the way, If you do go this route, 
you also need
to create a /etc/fstab file on your root filesystem for sysinst to use 
to figure out
where to install stuff (how to mount the disks). I just used "mkdir 
/mnt/etc /mnt/usr"
"mount /dev/wd1a /mnt", "mount /dev/wd1g /usr", "echo /dev/wd1a / ffs rw 
1 1 \
 >/mnt/etc/fstab", "echo /dev/wd1g /usr ffs rw 1 2 >> /mnt/etc/fstab",
"umount /mnt/usr /mnt" prior to retrying sysinst. You can ctrl-C out of 
sysinst if you
don't like the direction it is going in, and rerun the command by typing 
sysinst.


5) Once the snapshot is installed, and I manage to boot into it, it 
appears to run
just fine :) I haven't tried X yet on my mac, as it wasn't in the 
snapshot dir. When I
have a chance I will either download it or build it.

6) I have not seen any recent mention about SMP for the macppc. Is this 
in the
works? If there is something close I can at least help test it.

7) doing a newfs using apple partitions seems to setup some odd geometry
that takes a LOOONG time to newfs, compared to what I recall doing on my 
pc.
I used some 4.37 GB partitions and this took longer than I recall 80MB 
disks in
the past to do the superblock backups.

This is all I can remember right now, and I hope this helps make things 
easier for
others on this style machine. I really would like to be able to get 
ofwboot to
load a kernel from my /dev/wd1a root partition. If it can do this, 
please pass on
the magic incantation. Thanks to all who have given help to me so far, 
and also
to the writer of the INSTALL.txt file. If the data is in there, I 
haven't found it, but
I admit that it is very common for me to not be able to find the pliers 
next to my
hand without help.


Joseph Sarkes
jsarkes@tiac.net