Quoting Christopher SEKIYA <wileyc@rezrov.net>:

> On Tue, Nov 07, 2006 at 02:20:09AM +0000, Rui Paulo wrote:
>
>> Is this because sash can't boot from ELF ?
>
> The NetBSD bootloader currently needs ARCBIOS to work.  It's probably
> possible to frob the bootloader to work with the IP12 ROM routines; I looked
> at it a bit but didn't make any headway.

In my experience, only a few of the prom routines actually work. The  
vectors would appear to resemble their MIPS ancestry (see mipsco),  
however, from what I could gather most of them didn't appear to  
function at all. My impression was that SGI just put the necessary  
hardware support into sash. Keep in mind that I could well have done  
something wrong, so don't take this as absolute fact.

If you want to give it a shot there are a few working prom offsets in  
sgimips/sgimips/arcbios.c, which you could cross reference against  
mipsco/include/prom.h and see what you may be able to make work.

The alternative, of course, would be to squish some wd33c93 knowledge  
into the bootloader.

> Workaround is to put your kernel into the volume header and boot that instead
> of ip2xboot/sash.

This is by far the easiest way to go, though you may need a slightly  
larger than SGI-default volume header.

Steve