OldWorld Mac: 1, Boot Loader: 0

[Alex Zepeda]

Quoting Andrew McCall <mccall at digitalparadise.co.uk>:

> This isn't a flame at me is it? I am new to this mailing list, and I 
> wasn't presuming you didn't know this stuff already!  Sorry if I stepped 
> out too soon. :(

Oh, not at all.  I'm hardly well versed in the ways of the FreeBSD/x86 kernel,
let alone somethign as buggy^H^H^H^H^Hexotic as a PowerMac.

I'm all ears for a better suggestion.

> :)  I suppose its just down to opinion!  I feel a little more comfy with 
> the OW Macs as they seem to be more like a PC BIOS.  I have to agree 
> that the OFW is very broken though.

Ahh, well I'm all for moving away from the PC BIOS.  In fact I like the *idea*
of OpenFirmware a whole bunch.  It's just Apple's various subpar
implementations that drive me nuts.

> Almost every version has its own 
> quirks according to documentation I have read.  I like the way that )as 
> far as I am aware) you could have a OW Mac with *just* FreeBSD on it and 
> no boot parition.  As far as I can tell, you would need a HFS partition 
> on a NW Mac as the bootloader is built into the OFW and that only 
> understands HFS parititions.  I don ';t

Well, AFAIK none of the OF versions (yet?) grok the Apple Partition map.  This
is what makes dual booting quite a pain.  If you read over the NetBSD FAQ on
all this stuff (http://www.netbsd.org/Ports/macppc/), it goes over what the
various versions of OF do and don't support.

I'm pretty sure you don't need an HFS partition to do anything really.  You just
need to stick whatever you're loading in the first partition.  This is a non
issue for me at least because I would really like to dual boot off of the
internal disk (so far only possible with Darwin and Linux).

> Well if there is anyway I can help, let me know.  Could we not just use 
> the code from NetBSD, or is it a little more complicated that that? (as 
> I said, I am not skilled enough to code yet, but I think I know *how* I 
> should do it!).

Well for starters, the NetBSD file layout is quite different.  The next big
problem is that the nbsd loader didn't like the FreeBSD kernel too much. 
Different expected entry point perhaps?

- alex