Hi,

> i just wonder whether it's possible to boot from cdrom like booting from CF 
> attached to IDE...

When I first started playing with NetBSD on a blue and white G3 years ago, 
that's exactly what I did. But unless you use a CD-RW, you'll have to burn 
a new CD every time you want a new kernel, of course.

> AFAICS, the only thing needed is to put the bootloader and kernel onto a cd 
> (like the install isos)?

Yep.

> the RAID, configured to hold /, /usr etc., should be recognized by the 
> kernel?

RAID_AUTOCONFIG, or whatever the option is, will look for and find a 
candidate for a root / if one exists on a RAID set. The docs are pretty 
clear, and it works without any voodoo.

> i'm just curious in case i don't get an CF->IDE converter ASAP.

A CD or DVD should work fine, as would a separate IDE device (old IDE hard 
drive)

> furthermore, booting from an USB stick should also work, shouldn't it?

Depends on the machine. Some are capable of booting from USB, but I 
believe that the older ones are not (my original iMac G3 would not, for 
instance).

The only problem with mirroring the bootloader and kernel on both drives 
of the RAID 1 is that you'd still need a serial console if the first one 
failed and you wanted to tell the system to boot off of the second one 
remotely.

That is, unless someone can create an OF trick so you tell it to boot from 
an alias, wait 10 seconds, change the alias to point to the other drive, 
and loop.

John