FreeBSD-ppc on an external hdd (Mac Mini)

[Garance A Drosihn]

At 2:00 PM +1000 7/5/05, Peter Grehan wrote:
>
>>Could we do that with GPT-style partitions, instead of a single
>>APM-stype partition?
>
>  OpenFirmware doesn't understand GPT. An APM-formatted drive is
>always needed to boot from, with one of those slices formatted in
>either HFS+ or ISO9660 for OpenFirmware to load the FreeBSD stage2
>loader.
>
>Now, it would be possible to carve up an APM slice with GPT into
>partitions.

Yes, that is the direction I was thinking of.

>There is loader work required to support this. However, since
>the disk has to be re-sliced anyways to support FreeBSD, I've
>taken the lazy approach and thought it's easy at that point just
>to add a couple of extra APM slices for var/swap/whatever than
>do the loader GPT work.
>
>What do users think?  How would you folks like to see the install?

I'd like to stick with the idea of letting the MacOS DiskUtility.app
do whatever it wants for creating APM-style partitions, and then we
just steal a partition that it has created (the same way OpenBSD seems
to).  I'm a bit uneasy, for instance, that DiskUtility seems to create
two APM partitions on the disk for every volume that I ask the app
to create.  I think we'd be better off if we don't try to second-
guess what Apple thinks is on those alternate partitions.

At the same time, I'd like to be able to re-arrange my freebsd/ppc
partitions without having to reboot into MacOS.  I don't mind which
kind of partitions we stuff inside the APM-partition (slice?) that
we steal for installing FreeBSD, but I keep hearing that GPT is the
great and wonderful way for doing lots of partitions.  So, maybe
that is the way to go.

In a separate message on 7/5/05, Peter Grehan wrote
>>The thing is, I actually have more partitions than that.
>>MacOS sees them all, but FreeBSD only lists the first 16?
>
>  This is an artificial limitation in geom/geom_apple.c:
>
>>   #define NAPMPART  16    /* Max partitions */
>
>  I'll bump this up to 48 or so.

Thanks!

-- 
Garance Alistair Drosehn            =   gad at gilead.netel.rpi.edu
Senior Systems Programmer           or  gad at freebsd.org
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute    or  drosih at rpi.edu