On Fri, Oct 12, 2001 at 09:27:22AM +0200, Michael Schmitz wrote: > It won't be necessary - 1) only works on machines that have OF support for > booting from CD I think. With no requirement for MacOS drivers on > floppies, we can load a bootstrap from floppy directly.
OpenFirmware != MacOSROM miboot is a MacOSROM based bootloader NOT an OpenFirmware one. the MacOSROM can read CDs, but declares them irrelevant if they don't have a MacOS driver partititon that it can load to replace its burned in broken ones. the boot-floppies boot-hfs floppy does NOT use OF,it uses the MacOSROM, which doesn't require a driver partition on a floppy. > Booting from CDs on the old machines might work the way you describe if > all that OF asks is to run driver_init. From what I've seen discussed OF is not asking for the driver partitions and knows nothing about them nor cares if they exist, the problem is getting OF to read CDs AT ALL. generally it can't, or does so in such an unreliable way as to be worthless. you also have to tell OF to boot anything but the MacOSROM directly on the command line, which by default (and often is only capable) of being fed to a serial terminal. > before that's not the case (you need the CD drivers and a fake system file > to get the MacOS ROM even load your stuff from CD). OF never reads any disk, or medium, it simply passes control to MacOS ROM immediatly, thats why boot-device is /AAPL,ROM (thats not a disk, thats the OF device-tree path to the ROM). thats why apple didn't bother to make it able to read disks reliably, Apple's rule for OF development is: `if we don't use it atm, we don't bother to code it properly nor test it, nor give a damn if it works at all' at the time apple was not using OF to read the disk, much less a CD, thus OldWorld OF generally can't read disks very well, if at all. -- Ethan Benson http://www.alaska.net/~erbenson/
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