> But back to business. I get confused by people reporting bootX working on
> newworlds. I'm booting with yaboot, never did nor are intending
> to do anything else. It's just that I thought it was technically
> impossible to boot newworlds with bootX?
While it is technically possible to boot newworld Macs with BootX,
depending on the MacOS version, it is not recommended for a number of
reasons:
- BootX might be confused with a MacOS X booter of the same name. That
booter, much to my surprise, doesn't boot Linux kernels though :-). But
seriously, there are even some technical reasons:
- BootX is not supported anymore by BenH.
- BootX breaks with any recent MacOS release (8.6 is OK, I don't remember
hearing any problem reports, but later releases didn't work for at least
some people on some Macs). BootX perhaps breaks on any more recent
hardware than say early iMacs. Rather than compile a table for users to
figure out whether their particlular MacOS/hardware combination is
supported, tell everyone to switch to yaboot.
- BootX runs after MacOS has done some basic hardware init, most notably
display, keyboard and PCI init. At least MacOS 8.6 has a bug in the PCI
resource allocation for Mach64 display adapters which results in XFree 4
complaining about invalid PCI resources, disabling one of the Mach64
resources and crashing the kernel. Please note that the kernel boots
fine and works fine, except for X. Rather than compiling a table yadda
yadda... yaboot is the safe choice here. Been there, done that, switched
to yaboot.
AFAIK the only reasons _not_ to use yaboot are:
- you forgot to create the Apple_Bootstrap partition and absolutely cannot
repartition creating such a bootstrap partition from any of your existing
partitions (presumably because you forgot to create a swap partition
that could be reduced by 800k without causing major harm as well). Back to
square one, and read the documentation this time.
- you have some hardware that cannot be initialized properly by its Linux
driver, and has to rely on a MacOS INIT running before BootX (PCI cards
without OF boot ROM, anyone?). That's tough.
Ethan should have reports on such cases where yaboot could not be used at
all. I think these cases are extremely rare.
Michael
