On Fri, Feb 26, 1999 at 04:11:02PM -0800, Peter Abrahamsen wrote: > On Sat, 27 Feb 1999, Hartmut Koptein wrote: > > > > We'd do this via disk images, the same way the m68k people make Mac > > > boot disks. > > Correct, but how put you this image on floppy (on pmac and macos)? It is an > > image, so you can't do 'cp rescue-1440 floppy:' it must be in rawmode or > > with dd. > > Correct me if I'm wrong, but this should be dead easy. We give users a > vmlinux.coff and root.bin file, they put them on disks and set boot-device > to fd:vmlinux.coff, boot-file to ' initrd=root.bin'. Is there anything wrong > with this process? They would need OF Boot Variables for macos, of course. > If we feel like it, we could distribute the files as HFS diskcopy/shrinkwrap > -style disk images. > The only problem I can think of is what to do with non-macos users. What > other operating systems might people be running? Do all PPC machines that we > support use OF and have HFS support within it? We may have to make different > images for them, but that should not be hard. > If someone wants, I could go ahead and make the HFS images w/ shrinkwrap.
There will probably need to be at least two disks. The first would be HFS, and contain only one file - the bootloader should not have to deal with a complete floppy driver! The COFF format supports an embedded ramdisk. The other disk could be ext2 formatted, or more like the PC version (IIRC) a gzipped ramdisk. This would need to be shrinkwrapped- no HFS at all. Fortunately, this can be produced even without MacOS - ShrinkWrap can take raw files and write them to disk, given the proper type/creator. There's no meta-information in one of its existing file formats. Don't recall the type/creator off the top of my head though. This would only work for Power Macs. The other (PReP, CHRP) architectures we support would require their own boot methods, and I don't know much about that. Dan /--------------------------------\ /--------------------------------\ | Daniel Jacobowitz |__| CMU, CS class of 2002 | | Debian GNU/Linux Developer __ Part-Time Systems Programmer | | [EMAIL PROTECTED] | | [EMAIL PROTECTED] | \--------------------------------/ \--------------------------------/
