On Sat, 30 Jan 1999, Bob Nestor wrote:

> Date: Sat, 30 Jan 1999 07:26:35 -0600
> From: Bob Nestor <rnestor@metronet.com>
> To: Sean-Paul Rees <sean@flame.org>
> Subject: Re: native NetBSD booter
> 
> Sean-Paul Rees <sean@flame.org> wrote:
> 
> >There is this nifty invention that the LinuxPPC crowd use to natively boot
> >Linux or MacOS, from what I understand. Its called BootX. Perhaps we
> >should do something similar for NetBSD, so we don't have to keep going
> >through MacOS.
> >
> >Anybody have ideas or know if this is even possible?
> 
> I may have the wrong application in mind here, but when I looked at the 
> BootX code it seemed to be virtually identical to our Booter except it 
> was designed to work with PPC Macs equiped with PCI.  With our Booter 
> (and probably with BootX as well) you can install the appliation in the 
> MacOS Startup Folder and set it to automatically switch into NetBSD (or 
> Linux) soon after MacOS initially loads.  I believe this is exactly the 
> way the booter works in MkLinux as well.
> 
> It would certainly be nice to be able to boot directly into NetBSD but 
> there are a lot of hardware details that we know nothing about and that 
> aren't documented by Apple (at least not in anything we've been able to 
> access).  Our only option is to look at the data structures created by 
> MacOS which describe the hardware which are documented.  So we've 
> partially reverse engineered the Mac hardware, but the mapping still 
> isn't complete enough to be able to boot directly from hardware into 
> NetBSD.  Maybe someday, but not quite yet.

I'm curious, I've heard of A/UX which I understand is Apple's attempt at a
Unix. Does that run on a 68k and boot natively from a 68k without MacOS
help?

Sean-Paul Rees


> 
> -bob
> 
> 
> 
>