FreeBSD-ppc on an external hdd (Mac Mini)

[Peter Grehan]

Hi Garance,

> One of the reasons to create partitions is to split up a huge
> disk so it can be used by different operating systems.  In my
> case, I'd like to set up my Mac-mini so it could boot up MacOS,
> FreeBSD, or OpenBSD.  For that I pretty much need FreeBSD to
> support APM-style partitions, because the other OS's aren't
> going to support alternate partitioning schemes.

  Should be fine: FreeBSD supports reading APM-formatted h/w, but there 
isn't thus far a utility to edit them.

> Could we do that with GPT-style partitions, instead of a single
> APM-stype partition?  For PPC on Apple hardware, we already need
> to have the boot-loader to be sitting on a HFS+ partition (since
> open-firmware can not read our partition formats).  What is the
> issue with using GPT-style partitions for boot-disks?  Is it in
> finding the boot-loader, or is it the boot-loader itself which
> has no support for GPT?  Would there be less of an issue on PPC
> since file for the boot-loader itself would not need to be on a
> GPT-style 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. 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 ?

later,

Peter.