disklabel (was: install files on mac UFS partition) mac mini G4)

[kristoff <kristoff%skypro.be@localhost>]

Hi Valery, all,



On 07.11.21 02:38, Valery Ushakov wrote:
> > - I managed to format the first partition in HFS format and put
> > ofwboot.elf and ofwboot.xcf on it

> Why?  Do you plan to dual-boot with OS X?  ISTR you mentioned you
> don't, so why go through the unnecessary hoops?  All to end up with a
> filesystem for the bootloaders that you cannot write to natively too.

Do you mean to use a FAT partition?

My main concern is that I then need to delete/overwrite the Apple 
Partition Map, and I didn't know if I would be able to put it back, if 
that was needed.

(In the mean time, some body on the matrix room on netbsd proposed to do 
a 'dd' of the first few sectors of the disk so I had a copy.



Anycase, ofwboot.xcf does boot from my UFS partition, so I think that is 
not the issue anymore.
The problem is the 2nd step: get ofwboot to load and start the netbsd 
kernel (which is on the FFS partition).


> > Some blogs indicate that the '.xcf' version is buggy and that you
> > must use the 'elf' version, while other do use the '.xcf' in the
> > final configuration?

> On Mini G4 the XCF version exhibits a bug where it cannot load kernels
> larger than a certain size, so netbsd-GENERIC.gz would boot, but
> uncompressed netbsd-GENERIC wouldn't.  thorpej@ was fixing memory
> management issues in this area in -current a while back, so may be
> it's fixed already, I don't know.

OK, thanks for the info.


Somebody in the matrix chat-room yesterday noted that the output of 
3disklabel" was quite weird:
- no "c" partition
- type; unknown
- label: fictitious
- flags:
(no flags)


Can somebody who has a mac-mini post the output of the command 
"disklabel" so I can compare with what I have on my box?



I also found that I pdisk and disklabel give different results.

This is the pdisk table:
	type		name	length		base
1	Apple_Part_map	Apple	17		1
2	Apple_HFS	boot	1600		24
3	Apple_UNIX_SVR2	root	73398720	1624
4	Apple_UNIX_SVR2	swap	3907585		73400344


This is what I get with disklabel:
	size		offset		fstype
a	1600		24		ufs
b	4410496		73729664	swap
d	73728000	1664		4.2BSD



Shouldn't the "length" vs. "size", and "base" vs. "offset" be the sane 
for the root and the swap partitions?

Is this normal?


> -uwe
Kr. Bonne