Subject: Re: open firmware and Adaptec 2940UW Controller
To: James Tuman Nelson <jimtnelson@earthlink.net>
From: Chris Tribo <t1345@hopi.dtcc.edu>
List: port-macppc
Date: 04/05/2001 13:01:36
On Thu, 5 Apr 2001, James Tuman Nelson wrote:

> I neglected to mention that I am trying to boot a Power Mac 7500 running
> a 604 processor and trying to boot to NetBSD 1.5.
> The ROM version on the Power Domain 2940UW controller is 3.0, though I
> wonder if it is really installed, since no "words" are obtained from the
> controller under querying with Open Firmware.  I have not tried to flash
> it to version 4.1.  Might that help?

	It might. I see two updates on Apple's web site for OEM Adaptec
cards, one of which adds support "for booting OS X"

> Shouldn't there be a way to boot without the boot rom, using Open
> Firmware entirely to load the boot file from track 0 that would load
> netbsd and run it?  I suspect that Apple does it that way with
> /AAPL,ROM, which is why it boots MacOS from the 2940UW.

	Most likely, though I don't know how it glues itself to the Apple
ROM. It would be really fun if we could masquerade a NetBSD kernel as the
Mac OS System File and let the MacOS ROM do the load for us off an
HFS/HFS+ partition for any system, even NuBus PPC's (if and when they were
supported). Then just have an FFS partition for root.



	Chris