On Tue, 4 Jan 2000, Dan Winship wrote:

> > I think you can, though the tools aren't fully there yet - it's still a
> > very manual thing to do.
> 
> I've actually been trying to set this up on my new hard drive...
> 
> Problem one is that there's no NetBSD Mac partition editor, although
> MkLinux's "pdisk" works. (Although the interface sucks.)

Problem one a: pdisk doesn't set flags NetBSD looks at. Like the "I'm a
root", "I'm a usr", and "I'm a swap" flags.

> Problem two is that there's no way to tell the kernel that you changed
> the partition map on disk, so you have to reboot a lot.

Scott was working on this. The mac68k port has the same problem, and I
think an ioctl to tell the kernel to re-read the disklabel is the fix. It
should happen for 1.5 as mac68k sysinst needs it.

> Problem three is that the "mac partition converted to disklabel
> format" generated internally by the kernel doesn't have all the
> information you'd want, so you have to explicitly specify "-t ffs" to
> newfs.

Partally fixed with a modified pdisk. FFS & swap get preserved, but the
block size info doesn't:

  a:  1024000  9126804     4.2BSD        0     0     0   # (Cyl. 9054*-10070*)
  b:   512000 10150804       swap                        # (Cyl. 10070*-10578*)
  c: 25385471        0     unused        0     0         # (Cyl.    0 -25183*)
  d:      512      192    unknown                        # (Cyl.    0*-0*)
  e:   775159      704        HFS                        # (Cyl.    0*-769*)
  f:  8350941   775863        HFS                        # (Cyl.  769*-9054*)
  g:  2048000 10662804     4.2BSD        0     0     0   # (Cyl. 10578*-12609*)
  h:  6144000 12710804     4.2BSD        0     0     0   # (Cyl. 12609*-18705*)


> Problem four is the same as problem three actually, but harder to deal
> with: the kernel won't swap to a partition on the fake disklabel. I
> haven't gotten around to figuring out exactly what it doesn't like
> about them yet.

No "I'm swap" flags. See above. :-)

> (Related to problem four is kern/9101, which you should look at,
> because it's your fault. :-)

Fixed.

> So the support is not quite there, but it's close... 
> 
> (In the "winning" department: After creating the partition map under
> NetBSD (and then rebooting to make the kernel notice it), I hformatted
> the HFS partition in it, hcopy'ed in ofwboot.elf, and am able to boot
> from it from OFW.)

Cool!

Take care,

Bill