On Wed, 18 Oct 2000, Todd Vierling wrote:

> If the XCOFF loader is supposed to work under all OFW's, then effort should
> be put towards making it work properly.  A unified booter is a definite goal
> of NetBSD; that type of thing was done with a little Magic on the sparc port
> (where sun4 and sun4c/m boot very differently).

	OK, agreed. Um how? First we need an ofwboot.xcf that is compiled
at the right address. Can someone explain as to why it ofwboot.xcf is
compiled at 0x6c0000 when it should be 0x600000. There are only two or
three people that seem to know enough about low level IO and bootstrapping
to even discuss any of this, and they appear to be busy doing other 
things. There are also some larger hurdles to overcome, like mesh not
working right, not being able to load large kernels on older machines,
loads of OFW version/machine specific info, and making NetBSD happy with
HFS && HFS+

> We can certainly have an ELF loader, but if all *current* OFW's support the
> XCOFF loader, focusing on XCOFF makes the booting instructions a bit
> simpler.

	Not to mention makefiles, as long as we're on the subject:

	What we also need is something like vax or i386 with a five second
countdown , and the smarts to let boot disks span across multiple
floppies.


	Chris