Hello everyone,

I'm interested in developing a way to boot NetBSD without the MacOS at
all. I think I've narrowed down two ways to do it:

First, an imposter Apple_Driver partition: this would be loaded in early
boot by the start manager and then would find a certain NetBSD partition
then load and execute a second stage loader that would actually boot the
kernel.

The advantage of the imposter Apple_Driver is that it is loaded very early
and would be simple to implement since the documentation for writing an
Apple_Driver is easily available. The downside is that we would have to
create a user space utility in NetBSD to manage it.

Another way is to create an imposter System file: this would be loaded in
late boot, again by the start manager. The code in this imposter file
would need to locate the NetBSD root partition, load the kernel and then
execute it. There would be no need for a second stage loader.

The advantage of the imposter System file is that it could be managed from
the MacOS. The problem is that I have absolutely no idea what in the
System file gets called first by the start manager and how to get the
start manager to think that our imposter System file is really a System
file.

Please respond on the list if you have any comments about these ideas,
especially if you are interested in helping me create one of these
booters.

Also, I could use any and all information related to the start manager.
Feel free to email me that info. directly.

Thanks,

Mike Frager
mike@frager.org