[Posting from work because my home SS20 is toast - utterly curdled 9 Gb disk.]

Dan McMahill wrote:
> It's not done yet (waiting for some of my time to test instructions), but
> there is the start of a bootable CD how-to at
> 
> 	http://www-mtl.mit.edu/~mcmahill/netbsd/bootcd.html
> 
> One of the issues with making a bootable Sun CD is running the
> 'mksunbootcd' program on the ISO image.  I have not investigated if this
> program can be run on other systems (other == !NetBSD/sparc).

Why is "mksunbootcd" needed?   What about the "-B" option in "mkisofs" 1.12?

     -B img_sun4,img_sun4c,img_sun4m,img_sun4d,img_sun4e
          Specifies a comma separated list of  boot  images  that
          are  needed  to  make  a bootable CD for SPARC systems.
          There may be empty fields in the comma separated  list.
          This  option  is required to make a bootable CD for Sun
          SPARC systems.  If the -B  or  -sparc-boot  option  has
          been specified, the first sector of the resulting image
          will contain a Sun disk label. This disk  label  speci-
          fies  slice  0  for  the  iso9660 image and slice 1 ...
          slice 7 for the boot images that  have  been  specified
          with this option.  Byte offset 512 ... 8191 within each
          of the additional boot images must  contain  a  primary
          boot that works for the appropriate SPARC architecture.
          The rest of each of the images usually contains  a  UFS
          filesystem that is used for primary kernel boot stage.

          The implemented boot method is the  boot  method  found
          with  SunOS  4.x  and  SunOS 5.x.  However, it does not
          depend on SunOS internals but only on properties of the
          Open  Boot  PROM.  For this reason, it should be usable
          for any OS that boots off a SPARC system.

(mkisofs 1.12 comes with cdrecord 1.8)

Also, Dan, I found the bootcd.html section for SPARC a bit unclear.

"There are 3 steps involved in making a NetBSD/sparc bootable CD ROM.
 Step 1 is to create an "almost" full ISO 9660 image of whatever you want to
 put on the CD. For example: 

       mkhybrid -o output.iso -J -r -L /cdsources

 Now get a bootable (floppy) image.  [...]"

(1) Why an "almost" full ISO 9660 image?  What does "almost" mean?

(2) Why use a "bootable (floppy) image" instead of, say, the miniroot image?

(3) What is this "mkhybrid" program?  What's wrong with "mkisofs"?
    OK, I see that "mkhybrid" is in the Packages and that it's a program to
    "create a hybrid ISO9660/JOLIET/HFS/Rock Ridge filesystem."  Can't
    "mkisofs" do this at this point?  I see all sorts of references to
    ISO 9660 and Joliet and Rock Ridge in the "mkisofs" documentation ...

(4) Is this a in-general bootable CD-ROM we're talking about?  I would think
    one would want to boot up into the floppy image fs/shell, with the
    miniroot image on there somewhere (multi-session?), with a full UFS (or
    ISO 9660, I'm not choosy) filesystem to run out of to do an install from,
    a la the way the Solaris CD-ROMs have the full filesystem available to
    you when you're booted off of the CD.

Sorry for all the questions, but as you can see, it's unclear to me ...

Thanks,

	- Greg