On Mon, Oct 31, 2005 at 03:00:39AM +0100, Christian Müller wrote:
That is beside the point. The miboot stuff wasn't included for legal
reasons,
and i don't even understand why it was included in woody.
Yep, remember reading that somewhere - would it be possible to take
the NetBSD code producing ofwboot.xcf, legal-wise or is it also
unfree in the debian terms?
No idea of what that even is, could you describe it and provide a
pointer to
it ?
The idea:
* http://ezine.daemonnews.org/200009/sb.html gives a technical
oversight, pretty scsi-centric though - the boot stages netbsd uses are
described thoroughly though - there's also a nice figure that
illustrates things, but the image quality is horrible. They still work
with a load-base of 4000, after SystemDisk patches are applied it's
600000. After all, the article is from 2000, things may have changed.
Other links of interest:
*
ftp://ftp.netbsd.org/pub/NetBSD/NetBSD-2.0.2/macppc/INSTALL.html#Available%20Boot%20Media
(explains "partition zero" boot approach which results in the 3stage
process depicted above and a 2stage process where OpenFirmware looks
itself for ofwboot.xcf on partitions it is capable of reading)
*
ftp://ftp.netbsd.org/pub/NetBSD/NetBSD-2.0.2/macppc/INSTALL.html#Open%20Firmware%20boot%20syntax
* http://www.netbsd.org/Ports/macppc/faq.html (lengthy faq)
* http://netbsd.gw.com/cgi-bin/man-cgi?ofwboot+8.macppc+NetBSD-current
(ofwboot manpage)
*
http://netbsd.gw.com/cgi-bin/man-cgi?installboot+8.macppc+NetBSD-current
(installboot manpage)
The ofwboot manpage tells where 3-stage and 2-stage boot-process meet:
ofwboot *ofwboot* is installed via installboot(8)
<http://netbsd.gw.com/cgi-bin/man-cgi?installboot+8.macppc+NetBSD-current>
on systems with Open
Firmware versions less than 3. It is not necessary to
spec-
ify this file name, as it is stored in a special
location on
the disk, partition ``zero''. For example, the following
command might be used to boot from a SCSI device with
ID 2:
*0 >boot scsi-int/[EMAIL PROTECTED]:0*.
ofwboot.xcf *ofwboot.xcf* is in XCOFF format. This file is used on
all
Open Firmware 3 systems, and on Open Firmware systems
prior
to 3 when the bootloader is not installed in partition
``zero'', such as from an ISO-9660 format CD-ROM.
* http://www.netbsd.org/Ports/macppc/SystemDisk-tutorial/ (NetBSD also
messes with real-base, sure they will have their reasons, but it will
make a dual boot machine to a classic mac os uncomfortable - though mac
os boots with the tampered with real-base, but resets it to default.
i've read about systems prior to the beige G3 that reset many more of
the boot variables to defaults <- maybe hack a forth script into nvram
named bootlinux/bootbsd that sets proper variables and afterwards does 0
bootr if there is space in nvram for own forth functions <- are they
kept like varaibles I set??)
So in theory, I should be apple to boot it via OpenFirmware and
ofwboot.xcf on a filesystem OF understands (2stage) or by putting it at
load-base in partition zero (3stage).
I had trouble with the partition zero method, but I actually did manage
with a 2.4 OpenFirmware to fetch ofwboot.xcf from a iso9660 style cd.
It loads properly, greets with "NetBSD/macppc OpenFirmware Boot 1.10" -
it then asks for a kernel to boot, that's where I got stuck again.
Either I did not find the right format+path to tell him where to look
for the kernel (doc says OpenFirmware-Style path, but with "/" as
opposed to "\" to separate directories in a path) or it does not work at
this point (speaking for the Beige G3 I'm testing with, of course). It
might be that this is just unsupported for OFs < 3.
I *think* it is a size-issue that the NetBSD team uses ofwboot.xcf
instead of using one big xcoff-kernel-image, speculating though.
Somewhere I read a post saying that it might be possible to load a
vmlinuz.xcoff directly via OpenFirmware command (which would render the
extra ofwboot.xcf NetBSD uses pointless), I did not succeed in doing
so. I tried it with boot-devie set to
ide1/@0:,\INSTALL\POWERPC\VMLIN001.INI - if someone succeeded with
something like this, please come forward =).
Just thinking aloud: How difficult would it be to prepare a floppy that
would simply boot a cd? My understanding, might be wrong, is that this
is the case with isolinux where the "boot-floppy" is fetched via
el-torito into RAM and then goes from there to start a bloated system.
Wouldn't it be possible to let :something: like isolinux boot from a
real floppy on those oldworlds which is then responsible for getting a
bootable cd up and running - ideally this :something: would really only
just be enough to let cds boot which would have booted on macs with OF
3+ without any help. A helper disk based on miboot, so to speak. This
way installer teams on all distributions just have to focus on providing
OF3 bootable cds - if it were not for the legal problems of miboot and
those macs that don't have a cd-drive =).
Doing it fool-proof "partition zero"-wise is also not easy to do. One
is faced with different load-base settings, so you would have to know
prior to loading the loader where to put it - work-around might be more
than one entry-point for the code, at 4000, 600000, etc. But this is
too much of hazzle for hardware that's, basically, obsolete *no-nag*.
So long,
Christian
ps: btw, sorry for the personal mails, they account to me being lazy and
lame using the overly simple reply button :)
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