Subject: Re: Native boot [was Booter 1.8]
To: Bill Studenmund <wrstuden@loki.stanford.edu>
From: Leo Weppelman <leo@wau.mis.ah.nl>
List: port-mac68k
Date: 12/15/1995 22:47:22
[ ..... ]
> > > What would it take to have NetBSD/mac68k support "native"
> > > disklabels, which would be required for standalone?
> >
> > Some sweat. That's about it.
>
> Maybe we could just steal the Sun port's partitioning stuff? A few months
> ago I started a long thread on current-users about being able to read
> other ports' disklabels. Everyone hashed out a lot of problems, and
> then nothing got done. Maybe this would be a time to start on that road,
> seeing as we'll need to be able to read "native" (NetBSD-modifiable)
> and MacOS-based disklabels.
You might also want to check out the way the Atari port handles mixing the
'native' and NetBSD disklabels (by 'native' I mean the Atari-OS == AHDI
labels). It might save you from falling into the same pits as we did...
The NetBSD/Atari booter is also nearly finished.
The thread about reading other ports' disklabels died IMHO because
1) The size of the disklable structure is not fixed (the atari
has 16 partitions...).
2) Some ports (Atari/Amiga/Mac) also (or only) support their
'native' labels and turn them into 'fake' NetBSD labels. Not
all 'native' labels can be uniquely identified and you need
a lot of kernel bloat to include all this conversion code.
Leo.