Hello,

> >> I've been too busy with the other problems to work on the bootloader stuff
> >> for a while.
> >Me too - this interrupt problem gets on my nerves. Sure, I don't really
> >need the audio board, but >deadlocks like that should just not happen.
> >Besides that, the MPEG video IO board sits in the same bus, >thus sharing
> >the same interrupt and would likely need an interrupt priority level
> >higher than IPL_BIO too.
> >
> 
> Probably not too much I can help with there. I'm going to try to get
> somewhere on the mace issue.
I just thought the problem with the 3rd mc interrupt might be related.

> >I have NetBSD alone on a drive and I wouldn't like an MSDOS partition just
> >for the boot loader.
> Yes, this is a downside. It takes one of the four available MBR partitions.
I don't have an MBR at all, only a rudimentary Apple partition map for the boot loader, the rest is in a native BSD disklabel.

> On the plus side, I've noticed that when booted into OS X on my G4, it will
> see the MSDOS MBR partition on the disk that contains my OpenBSD stuff
> (which I'm trying to preserve but migrate to NetBSD). It won't see the FFS
> stuff, at least not by default.
Hmm, OSX and NetBSD seem to agree about UFS partitions, but as far as I can tell OF doesn't know UFS so I have to load ofwboot.xcf from a HFS+ filesystem which NetBSD can't read...

> Sometimes it'd be nice to be able to move
> files from MacOS to *BSD and vice-versa, so a common MSDOS partition might
> be useful. There is also a lot of opposition to MBR, though. For me, since
> I do a lot of bootloader testing it makes sense though.
Well, as I said, on my iBook NetBSD lives happily in a UFS partition, no problems at all to access it from OSX. Didn't try soft dependencies yet though.
Hmm, wasn't there some work under way to support HFS(+) directly in NetBSD?

> >Agreed, the ethernet portion of the E100 card would be another candidate (
> >OF doesn't see it for some >reason ), but that would pretty
> >likely get too complex pretty soon.
> 
> Yes, if I understand your previous email regarding this, your card does not
> contain any OF, in which case OF will only assign a node and basic
> addresses.
No. The card contains an OF ROM ( but not enough to boot anything besides MacOS and only for the SCSI part )
OF doesn't see the ethernet part at all, if there was a generic node everything would be fine, but there's nothing at all. Apparently OF doesn't expect a device 17 on the first bandit.

> >> I also swap CPUs from time to time and
> >> I'd rather have the L2 configuring not hard coded into the kernel.
> >Sure. I only did it because it was the only way to get the L2 cache
> >enabled at all.
> 
> I had to write the code because I have a XLR8 ZIF Carrier card that lets me
> swap in raw CPU chips, but it doesn't have any L2 information in OF with
> it, obviously.
Yep, as far as I can tell the backside cache on my CPU card doesn't end up as an OF node either, it only knows about the mainboard cache.

> I can probably advise someone on how to implement it in
> ofwboot. It made a huge difference in boot speed, epecially on gz'd MD and
> INSTALL images.
Hmm, on my iBook the time between boot hd:,\... and the first kernel messages is hardly noticeable, on the S900 it's ca. 1 second, on the other hand this hardware isn't exactly slow. INSTALL kernels with big MD images are a completely different matter though.

have fun
Michael