At 8:21 AM +0200 7/18/03, you wrote:

:)What's the difference between the two models? Mine is 1U, 3 PCI slots at
:)66MHz/64 bits, 2 USB, 2 firewire 800, one firewire 400, serial, built-in
:)giga ethernet.

Primarily speed.  The newer Slot loating model has 1.33 GHz G4 CPUs vs. 1.0
GHz.  Faster bus speeds.  A slot loading CD/DVD drive vs. tray loading.
ATA/133 vs. ATA/100.  And FireWire 800 and 400 vs. 400 only.  Sounds like
you've got the newer one.

http://www.everymac.com/systems/apple/xserve/index.html

It's pretty similar to the currently shipping PowerMac G4 (FW 800) model,
probably based on the same motherboard design.  It seems the primary
ATA/100 bus on the PowerMac G4 (FW 800) model is not supported by NetBSD
1.6.1.  How well does your Xserve run 1.6.1?

:)Of course you can do that, but if you revert OF settings to defaults,
:)you'll need to plug-in a keyboard and monitor to set it up again. With
:)the video board removed, serial is the default.

Well, it really boils down to how the user wants to use their Xserve.  I'll
mention both options.

:)INSTALL.
:)It's not a problem of /etc/ttys: when running single-user that settigns
:)are not used to choose the console speed.

Does it work fine (i.e. 57600) with GENERIC_MD?

:)How does MacOS X works? They have a bootloader in the apple partition
:)map, right? Coulnd't we setup something like that? It would be possible
:)to dual boot easily.

For OF3 systems booting from an HFS+ partition, there is no bootloader in
the partition map.  Open Firmware just loads a CHRP boot file with HFS type
'tbxi' directly from the disk.  The CHRP boot file has a few FORTH commands
and the XCOFF bootloader embedded in it.

I'm not sure about other situations (OF3 with UFS root and OF 1 and 2).  My
impression is that there's a bootloader in the partition map which loads
the CHRP file from HFS or UFS partitions.

The XCOFF bootloader embedded in the CHRP file loads the mach microkernel.

I'd be happy to do some epxperimentation to figure everything out if you or
someone else were going to improve how NetBSD/macppc bootstraps.  Also,
Darwin bootstraps the same as MacOS X and the sources are available :)

  -- MW