On Sun, 6 Feb 2005 17:15:52 -0800
Michael Wolfson <michael@nosflow.com> wrote:

> Make an HFS (non-plus) partition and use pkgsrc/sysutils/hfstools, or 
> muck around with ISO9660 or MS-DOS file systems.  No one who 
> understands the boot process has found enough time to get a better 
> bootloading system working.

I've been stumped by a problem with OF 1.0.5, or I would have posted a
unified MBR approach by now. For some reason, OF 1.0.5 insists on
loading the same 0x800 bytes of the bootloader over and over again when
the bootloader resides on an MS-DOS formatted MBR partition. I've
already patched fdisk to allow writing to the first sector, as well as
fixed the problem in disksubr.c that keeps MBR from being used, so the
only hold up is figuring out if the problem is in what formatting OF is
expecting for the MS-DOS partition. From there it'd be trivial to add
another bootloader flag (as I did for L2 caches) to specify which MBR
partition to find the kernel on. That'd allow booting multiple NetBSD
installs on the same disk.

I let this go for a while and lately I've been revamping the DBDMA
engine in if_mc.c, which appears to be the problem with the ethernet
interface appearing to die during max throughput downloads. The existing
DBDMA interface, in addition to no real Tx ring, doesn't look
at the status of the DBDMA commands after completion. I've got
one last command status to figure out and that should take care
of it (32 Rx buffers, 32 Tx buffers, chip resets are almost
non-existent). Hopefully I'll have this resolved soon and will get back
to the bootloader stuff.

tim