Booting a modularized NetBSD 6 kernel (ffs.kmod)

[William Ross <willspost%googlemail.com@localhost>]

Hi All,

Trying to boot the current NetBSD 6 Beta builds on a G4 iMac.
I can install just fine, but after the install I can't work out how to load the 
ffs.kmod kernel extension. In NetBSD 5 I could boot with an Open Firmware 
command like:

boot hd:9,ofwboot.xcf

The bootloader would find the netbsd.gz kernel file and boot into NetBSD. But 
now that the FFS support is only in a module the boot hangs where it should be 
mounting the root filesystem. I can't find any documentation about how to tell 
ofwboot.xcf to load ffs.kmod (which I presume is what needs to happen).

The only documentation I can find is for i386, where the bootloader reads a 
boot.cfg file which tells it which modules it needs to read into memory for the 
kernel, before passing control to the kernel.

The other thing they are building for i386 is a purely monolithic kernel to use 
when the modules aren't setup properly - but there isn't one of these in the 
macppc builds.

Any ideas?

Thanks,

Will