On Feb 6, 2005, at 5:21 PM, Peter Seebach wrote:

> Well, it's all pre-Mini stuff, but I've been assuming it's like any 
> other
> OF3 system.

It ought to be.

> Hmm.  Okay, so how does the Mac boot from a UFS root?  I know I had 
> mine
> doing that for a while.

Indirectly.  AFAICT, there's usually a small HFS+ partition holding 
BootX, a CHRP script with embedded XCOFF bootloader.  BootX will load 
the UFS mach kernel.

> I may try to figure this out enough to contribute something, just 
> because
> I'm really confused.

That would be *really* cool.

>   But now I think I understand what I need to do, which
> is use HFS+ for the boot partition, and either UFS or FFS for root... 
> UFS
> would let me copy files around under MacOS...  Okay, I think I get it.

Right.  The only gotcha is that without an FFS partition, NetBSD's 
kernel defaults to using the first partition it finds, not necessarily 
the first UFS partition.  I'd love to get this changed, so I don't need 
to hard-wire my root partition in a custom kernel to auto-boot.

> It's made substantially more confusing by the Mini's tendency to boot 
> to
> what seem to me to be unpredictable and random partitions when I tell 
> it
> to mac-boot.

Have you set a "startup disk" from within MacOS X?  It's in "System 
Preferences".

   -- MW