Ken Hornstein writes:
> The boot block is something that's a little smarter than the BIOS.  It
> knows something about the operating system that it's going to boot.  In
> the case of NetBSD, the NetBSD boot block knows how to search the root
> filesystem on the disk, open up a particular file (in this case, "netbsd"),
> load it, and execute it.  Then the kernel starts running, and normal
> Unix things start to happen.

This isn't strictly true any more -- the new boot blocks are two
stage, like SunOS/Solaris' boot blocks. The first stage has the second 
stage's locations on disk hard coded in, and the second stage knows
how to read an ffs file system.

Perry