Re: Sparc bootblock

[Andrei Warkentin]

IANA mac guru, but the OF in Old Worlds (OF 1.0.5) has support for  
reading from block devices, parsing *some* filesystems (this but is  
pretty crippled - for example, no fragmentation can occur on a FAT  
floppy, because it just loads data linearly). It can boot from a  
partition 0 boot block (example: first stage QUIK boot block for  
Linux), or from an XCOFF file (example: ofwboot.xcf from NetBSD/ 
OpenBSD). The NetBSD ofwboot page goes into a lot of gory details of  
what the problems are with Old World OF =) - apparently the biggest  
one are rather inconvenient load-base and real-base. It certainly  
understands iso9660 and FAT (somewhat).

On Oct 17, 2005, at 3:20 AM, Marco Gerards 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...
>
> --
> Marco
>
>
>
>
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