Subject: Re: NetBSD and the 68030 MMU
To: None <fair@cesium.clock.org, thorpej@nas.nasa.gov, ws@kurt.tools.de>
From: Andrew Cagney <cagney@tpgi.com.au>
List: port-powerpc
Date: 10/25/1996 09:32:56
>> NetBSD/powerpc already `go'es. It's my understanding that these
>> PCI-based Macs use OpenFirmware, and load an XCOFF bootstrap. If
>> this is indeed the case, with a small program to convery a.out to
>> XCOFF, NetBSD/powerpc might Just Work on such Macs (albeit using the
>> firmware for all i/o).
>Well, it's probably a bit more work than that. While I don't know enough
>(actually nearly nothing) about Apple's OpenFirmware implementation, I assume
>that the partitioning scheme of the Macs is different from the one on PCs
>(which was adopted by PReP and PPCP). So it's quite likely that the
>disk label handling code needs some work, too.
>Just a minor nit.
Hopefully much of what is needed here is described in the CHRP OB
bindings document (see http://playground.sun.com/p1275/). Near
the end of this document the process of figuring out the disk label is
described in a reasonable amount of detail.
For CHRP, I believe that apple should be:
o fdisk partition the disk
o within an fdisk partition
put all its MAC partitions
The only question then is, what have the done on existing mac's.
Andrew