On Tue, 23 Feb 1999, Mike Frager wrote:

> 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.

I think this method would be the best of the two. It's been a
while since I read IM, but I seem to recall that Apple added hooks 
to boot other OS's at about this stage. I thought it was a little
different in that an Apple_Driver is trying to be a MacOS disk driver,
while the other-os thingie is trying to be an OS-booter. The difference
being that if you choose to boot MacOS, with the booter different from the
disk driver, you could still have a macOS disk driver.

Probably the best thing to do is to add two partitions, one containing
code the other preferences.

Take care,

Bill