> And here's one I am dreading:
>  * Making sure it's 6.0.x-compatible. Is this really necessary? I need input.
> 
> -Brian, booter guy

IMHO it is more important to get NetBSD/mac68k to boot _native_ without
requiring a MacOS license, or 'Booter'.  Yes, sounds pretty difficult,
but..  I've been messing with the MacMinix standalone code written
by Brad Pickering.  I have the patches installed, and have been building
bootable floppies with it.  By bootable I mean that my IIci initializes,
brings up the "happy mac" and reads code off the floppy.  The bootblock
loads a program called "macboot" that is written to the floppy
immediately following the bootblock.  The macboot code originally loaded
the minix kernel/fs/mm/init, but I just stripped it down to the point
where it prints "NetBSD BOOT xxxxxx" (for laughs).  Both the bootblock
and macboot are linked against the crtmac.o and libmac.a from MacMinix,
so that would need to be replaced.  Macboot can use the ROM to load the
kernel, just like the secondary boot program on other ports.
Basics: (no real differences here)
	Mac loads bootblock
	bootblock uses ROMs to load 'boot'
	boot loads kernel via ROMs, _or_ 5380 code (ROMs preferred)
	kernel takes over

Questions:
	How could this work for a hard-disk where the ROMs expect to
	load a device driver from the disk?  The ROMs obviously have
	to be able to read blocks from the disk, so wouldn't the
	bootblock just use this feature to read the second-level boot,
	etc?  
	How about the MMU?  On several machines MODE32 is used to
	cleanup the ROMs/MMU (right?)  With a standalone boot, this
	would need to be done by the boot code, or the kernel.
	Would the MRG code still work? (considering no ROM patching
	done by MacOS)
	What would it take to have NetBSD/mac68k support "native"
	disklabels, which would be required for standalone?

The real question, I guess, is:  Does anyone other than me want this
functionality?  I personally don't use the IIci for any "Mac" type stuff,
so having the ability to use MacOS isn't necessary for me.

Anyway, I'm not much of a programmer, so I probably won't get very
far on standalone booting.  (but I sure would like it..)

-Andrew
-- 
============================ Real 32bit multi-tasking UN*X System
Andrew Gillham             | TCP/IP,NFS,PPP,4.4BSD-lite,multi-user
gillham@andrews.edu        | i386,sparc,alpha,mac68k,amiga,others
LAN/WAN/NW/UN*X specialist |   ---> http://www.NetBSD.org <---