At 2:24 PM -0500 3/1/99, Dr. Bill Studenmund wrote:

>I really like the fact you decided to go w/ boot blocks rather than a fake
>driver. Other reasons for this change: floppies don't have partitions, but
>can have boot blocks, and the boot blocks will have all scsi drivers
>loaded.

And NetBSD living on another physical disk too! By the time the bootblocks
execute enough stuff should be around to boot off of another disk. This is
important for floppies since only the smallest of custom kernels will fit on
a floppy, or (heaven forbid!) an 800k floppy!

>Oh, I think that ethernet cards would also be set up (stage 1 NuBus init).
>An IP stack wouldn't though.

I think this depends on the card. Some cards are dumber than others.
However, I have noticed many machines that have a .NetBoot driver in their
ROMs. This could provide us with a first pass at netbooting NetBSD. You just
have a box on the network running NetATalk serving out a NetBSD MiniRoot
with kernel. A "diskless" machine floppy boots with a NetBoot-capable
booter. The booter probes the network and things start movin'.

Later on, we can write small, polled, drivers for most cards and then do
things like tftp booting.

>> Read and write to/from PRAM
>
>Why?

Storing boot info in PRAM might be handy. Though, since we have to rely soley
on disks, we might as well store any info we'd store in PRAM onto disk.



_______________________________________________________________________
 Michael Zucca - mrz5149@acm.org - http://www.mdc.net/~mrz5149/
 "I will choose a path that's clear. I will choose Freewill. "
  --Rush, Freewill
_______________________________________________________________________