Re: Building a macppc bootable USB image

[Tom Lane <tgl%sss.pgh.pa.us@localhost>]

Valery Ushakov <uwe%stderr.spb.ru@localhost> writes:
> On Wed, Jan 17, 2024 at 20:56:27 +0000, David Brownlee wrote:
>> Technically it should be possible to generate an image which could be
>> written to a USB device and booted for a large chunk of macppc
>> machines, and would make it very much easier for people to try and
>> install NetBSD/macppc.

> Searching seems to indicate that it seems to be possible, though not
> "officially supported".

> I think I briefly tried to but was not successful, when I did
> experiments with my g4 mini, but I don't seem to have any notes so
> this might be false memories.  May be it needs the apple pmap, not
> MBR, so I might have given up at that point.

Likely depends on which boot ROM revision the machine has.  I had a
G4 tower (the 2003 mirrored-drive-doors one) that I booted off a USB
stick on more than one occasion.  Sadly that got flaky and is gone.
I also have a G4 laptop whose boot ROM doesn't seem to see anything
at all out the USB port, despite being newer than the tower (both by
machine age and boot ROM version number).  Sigh.

Per my notes, the tower had only USB 1.1, so using a USB device for
any sort of live install would be painfully slow.  That leaves me
a bit dubious about the size of the market for live images.  But
an installer image could make sense.

			regards, tom lane