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Re: Sparc bootblock


From: Cyril Plisko
Subject: Re: Sparc bootblock
Date: Mon, 17 Oct 2005 12:37:40 +0200

On 10/17/05, Marco Gerards <address@hidden> wrote:
> Bart Grantham <address@hidden> writes:
>
> > - verify that the code works on PPC, and if not, try to make it work
> > so that there's a unified bootblock [not sure if this is reasonable as
> > I'm not as familiar with how PPC OF boots... how similiar is it to
> > Sparc?]
>
> On the Open Firmware implementations on the PPC machines I worked with
> you can load an ELF file directly.  Open Firmware has support for
> reading from block devices, parsing partition maps and it has support
> for some filesystems.
>
> So at least of the New World Mac, the Pegasos, etc. this is not
> required.  Perhaps we need such bootblock for the old world mac...
>

AFAIK OpenFirmware per se does not require all these fancy filesystems
to be supported. CHRP machines grok some filesystems and Pegasos'
SmartFirmware took it much further adding support for many types
of filesystem. The SPARC OpenBoot (Sun's OpenFirmware implementation)
isn't like that. IIRC it hardly understands UFS. The usual way to boot on SPARC
is to load a bootblock from the known disk position (the first sectors
usually) and
to pass control to it. Much like PC BIOS does.

Cyril

> --
> Marco
>
>
>
>
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