Hiya folks,

Just to let you know that version 0.99a is out of the new bootloader; this 
include support again for ARM 610 based machines. So i hope noone will have 
noticed that the new bootloader failed to work with these processors 
(ahum)... the detection went wrong resulting in issueing an illegal 
co-processors instruction ARM 6/7 don't like at all...

To follow up:

On Sun, Mar 24, 2002 at 10:07:24AM +0000, Dave Daniels wrote:
> In article <20020321190824.J508-100000@furtle.home>,
> The problem is that bb_riscbsd cannot handle properly the case
> where the RISC OS partition is greater than four gigabytes in
> size. Looking at the code, I *think* it will work correctly if the
> RISC OS partition size exceeds this, but you try this at your own
> risk. All bb_riscbsd does is set up a pointer in the boot block of
> the disk to the NetBSD partition. This is just a cylinder number,
> the value you enter. There is a sanity check to make sure this
> cylinder number does not lie in the RISC OS portion of the disk,
> but this test goes wrong if the RISC OS partition size exceeds the
> four gigabyte mark. (Actually, it treats the size as signed
> quantity so it goes wrong if it exceeds two gigabytes.) This is
> not a trivial fix as it will be necessary to change the RISC OS
> SWIs used by the code to find the disk size and then to test it to
> destruction. 

Good question ... i'll have a look at it hopefully it can be fixed before 
the release.

> I noticed this a while back. I guess I ought to open a pr for it.

Oh please do ... issues like this tend to get forgotten too easily :(

> Bootloader issues have largely been resolved. However, there are
> several bootloaders in circulation now. Versions of the updated
> original bootloader work with RISC OS 4 and RISC OS Select, but
> there is a problem if your machine appears to have more than four
> blocks of physical memory in it (which is what can happen with
> RISC OS Select). You will need the 'memfix' module if you have RISC
> OS 4.03, but this should be included with the bootloader now and
> dealt with automatically.

All `new' bootloaders i.e. BtNetBSD ought to have fixed this yes.. The 
newer BtNetBSD from version 0.99 ought to have expirimental support for 
Kinetic machines too ... there are some issues still but hopefully it'll 
work fine as long as you put in enough conventional RAM in it to also run 
fine. This won't give maximum performance but its a start.

Cheers,
Reinoud