On Thu, 19 Oct 2000, Ben Harris wrote:

<snip>
> >Is that necessary for macppc?  Only OF 1 and OF 2 machines have floppy
> >drives, and those machines don't ship with USB ports and can't boot from
> >USB hard drives anyways.  The floppy kernel can be stripped of USB drivers,
> >shrinking its size substantially.
> 
> OF 1 machines can still have USB ports though (mine's got them), and it
> would certainly have been nice to have been able to install over my USB
> Ethernet adaptor rather than having to use a dodgy SCSI mag-opt drive.  I'd
> thus like the INSTALL kernel to come with USB support if at all possible,
> even on OF 1 systems.

	And so can OF 2.x machines, the problem is that booting from OFW
means that the USB card has to have OpenFirmware fcode that allows it to
boot. I do not know of any USB cards that have OFW ROM on them, other than
what comes built into the motherboard on newer Macs. If I do a device tree
the card just shows up as /pci/xxxx,xx with a minor and major number that
my ROM doesn't know about. You cannot boot off of it (this is a Belkin USB
PCI card, AFAIK it is the same exact chipset that Keyspan uses as
well.). Even OF 3.x machines cannot boot from a USB Ethernet adapter I
don't think, they only support USB hard drives/removable media
drives. It's not quite so simple.


	Chris