>On Wed, Dec 1, 1999, MAZAfsckER <green@donnelly.cc.ks.us> wrote:
>
>>I have a kind of lame question:
>>is there any possibility to install bootX or some kind of OS loader on my
>>G3 266 under netbsd.
>>NetBSD is the only system that is running on this box. unfortunately due
>>to some bugs in OF (2.0f) I can't boot it from ide directly, that's why I 
>>use floppy to boot and give the 'boot' program '-a' parameter.
>>
>>I heard that bootX fixes that bug.
>
>Currently, BootX can only boot LinuxPPC. It's possible to adapt NetBSD to
>be booted by BootX, but I don't think it's a really good idea. It's
>probably better to install the OF patches from Apple. Those patches are
>installed by Darwin/MacOS X "System Disk" application and, I think (Peter
>Bierman can confirm), are open sourced (Apple licence).

That depends...

OF is in ROM, by definition.  The B&W machines have "easily" upgradable ROMs
and the older machines don't.  That means that the OF patches will never
be available on Beige G3s, 7600s, etc.

Apple's built-in OF selector for booting is slick, and I agree that NetBSD
should support it.

I also think BootX is a great idea for those of us who want to boot NetBSD
on one of these older machines.

My question: What support is required of the kernel to be bootable by BootX?
Seems to me that if one has a kernel that you can load into memory and
invoke, there shouldn't be much more, no?  Is the parameter passing
so different between NetBSD and linuxPPC?  Aren't they
both ELF?

-dgl-