[widely off-topic for port-i386...]

At 09:13 29.01.01 -0500, gabriel rosenkoetter wrote:
>Sorry, let me rephrase that, now that I'm fully concious and it's
>daylight:

;)

>Both the macppc and mac68k ports are capable of reading very small
>bits of information in a quick and dirty way off of HFS partitions.

Ah, that's what you were aiming at!

>(It is possible to boot a kernel from an HFS(+) partition in macppc
>under *some* versions of OpenFirmware,

But that is access of the kind "go to block #47110815 and read 3461 blocks 
to memory" - done by OF. Little HFS knowledge involved here. And once the 
kernel takes over, nothing of that "knowledge" is left.

>and the mac68k boot loader can read its kernel from the MacOS side before 
>switching over to
>NetBSD.)

The mac68k booter relies on the MacOS File Manager for that. Once the 
kernel is in control, the Mac forgets everything it ever knew about HFS(+). 
Unfortunately...

         hauke

--
Hauke Fath                        Tangro Software Components GmbH
                                         D-69115 Heidelberg
hf@Tangro.DE                       Ruf +49-6221-13336-0, Fax -21