On Thu, 9 Apr 1998, Michael R Zucca wrote:

> Well, we'd need three more things:
> 
> - The ability to partition a drive using MacOS style partitions from
>   NetBSD.
>   This requires some additions to the kernel.

What sort of additions?  Is this the "writing disklabels" discussion
again?  Is there an ioctl or anything to force NetBSD to re-read the
partition table?  If there were, is there any chance pdisk could be
ported?

> - The ability to access HFS partitions in some manner.
>   A special program built around a read-only HFS module (like the old HFS
>   program) could be used for install purposes. Though a full-blown file
>   system would be nice.

You want to talk about bizarre... I looked in the Mach Kernel from MkLinux
in the hopes of porting that (read-only) HFS code to NetBSD....  It's
literally a wrapper around hfsutils.  The Mach Kernel apparently has a
means of accessing a filesystem on a file-by-file basis w/o knowing about
the structure of the filesystem... and that takes advantage of it.  No
chance that NetBSD has any capability like that, is there?



> With #1 above and a bootsector booter we could have a completely self
> contained installer on a floppy like the Linux-pmac folks (not to be
> confused with the MkLinux folks who still use MacOS installers).

The pre-DR3 MkLinux release uses the RedHat installer, FWIW.  Still
bootstraps from their booter extension like regular MkLinux, though.


David

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