Re: Data Access Exception when trying to Boot installed NetBSD of hard drive

[Mouse <mouse%Rodents-Montreal.ORG@localhost>]

>> Some machines insist on boot partitions beginning at/near the
>> beginning of the disk; others don't; I forget which are which....
> Even my Ultra 2, which is much newer then the original poster's
> system requires the kernel to be within the first 4GB.

"Newer" is not quite as relevant as you seem to think.  Even among
sparc32 machines, I've never found anything else (like "designed before
$DATE") that reliably indicates whether "has the 1G boot partition
limit" applies.

And it is 1G; the issue is the use of 6-byte SCSI CDBs, which have only
21 bits of sector address and thus can address only the first gig.  If
you have a machine with a 4G boot partition limit, the issue behind it
is something else - most likely, I'd guess, the use of 32-bit byte
offsets somewhere in the relevant code paths.  (There is a similar
issue with 10-byte CDBs, but that limit is much higher.  If I'm reading
an include file correctly, they have 32 bits of address, for a 2T
limit.  There's a similar limit for IDE at 128G, IIRC, but I don't
recall details; if it's a similar addressing limit, it would be 28 bits
of address, which seems possible but unlikely.)

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