Subject: Re: Where/how is rootvp set in kernel initialisation?
To: None <thorpej@zembu.com>
From: Colin Wood <cwood@ichips.intel.com>
List: tech-kern
Date: 09/21/2000 15:09:04
Jason R Thorpe wrote:
> On Thu, Sep 21, 2000 at 08:56:48PM +0200, Martin Husemann wrote:
> 
>  > > The "Install from MacOS" tools should really die, actually.
>  > 
>  > I dare to differ - to some degree, or maybe I misunderstood this (not knowing
>  > mac86k).
>  > 
>  > I'd actually like to see some kind of bootstrap loader from MacOS (for macppc
>  > too), but to the extend of something like "dosboot" on the i386. Actual
>  > installation, of course, should be done by sysinst from the ramdisk in the
>  > kernel loaded by this tool.
> 
> MacOS booter is fine, MacOS installer is not.  It makes the port alien and
> lacking in features.

certainly, but there still remains one rather tiny problem before sysinst
is truly useful on mac68k:  native HFS support.  actually, it's a pretty
big problem.  it's unlikely (even in this day and age), that every mac
will have a working network connection over which you can either ftp the
tarballs or do an NFS mount to get them.  a large number of macs don't
have cdroms, either.  this leaves an install from the local harddrive as
the only option.  the filesystem is usually HFS (although i've thought of
possibly creating an MSDOS partition to dump the tarballs into and getting
around the HFS dependency that way...)

later.

colin