On Wed, 9 Oct 1996, Nick Sayer wrote:

> I want to make a bootable CD for NB-sparc similar to the ones for
> SunOS 4.x. That is, partition 0 is an ISO filesystem, partitions 1-n
> are filesystems containing a kernel that loads up a memory filesystem
> containing tools sufficient to load the miniroot from the ISO slice
> and boot it (format, dd, mknod, anything else of interest).
>
> [ ... ]
> 
> 2. When booting the OBP loads /boot, using the list of blocks set
> up by installboot. So I can make a tiny FS, do an installboot, copy
> a kernel and whatever else in. Fine. Does the NetBSD /boot know how
> to read in the kernel from a CDROM based partition instead of a
> regular disk?

/boot uses the library routines in /sys/lib/libsa to interpret the
filesystem handed to it by OBP.  Currently it only understands NFS and
UFS because there are no ISO9660 routines in the standalone library.

I suspect that adding the 9660 system to the boot process will require
creating those routines and modifying /sys/arch/sparc/stand:
	conf.c		Add 'file_system_9660' fs_ops structure.
	promdev.c	Remove insistance that if the boot device is a
			'block' device, the filesystem must be UFS.

It's quite a project, so unless you're really in a coding mood, I'd say
the answer is no.

-J