On Tue, Jan 11, 2000, John Franklin <franklin@elfie.org> wrote:

>MacOS has to do the same things that we'll need to do with OF.  MacOS seems
>to already shutdown OF within the Trampoline Code[1], which sounds like
>a second level booter to me.
>
>The problem I see with RTAS is the lack of documentation for it.  I only 
>did a quick search of the Apple Developer Site [2], which only brought up
>some glossed over references to it.  What it does bring up makes it sound
>like the PPCs version of the Alpha's SRM, which our Alpha port uses and,
>IIRC, help keeps the Alpha developers sane.  It wouldn't surprise me if
>Apple didn't provide RTAS docs, but someone else does.  Besides, if 
>LinuxPPC already has RTAS support, that would make our job easier.
>
>This sounds like the best thing for the macppc port as it both makes it
>easy to handle future hardware and may even clear up some of the problems
>we've had, like the USB key-repeat bug.

RTAS docs are in IBM CHRP documentation. Unfortunately, as I said
earlier, it doesn't work. My experience with MacOnLinux (the MacOS
"virtual machine" we have on Linux which runs the MacOS ROM within a kind
of emulated environement) shows that MacOS instantiates RTAS but doesn't
use it.